Mridha, five others sued
The Anti-Corruption Commission yesterday sued a suspended general manager of the railway's east zone and five other staff in connection with irregularities in the department's recruitment process.
Three cases were filed with Chittagong Kotwali Police Station. General Manager Yusuf Ali Mridha, suspended over a Tk 70 lakh scam in April last year, and senior welfare officer Golam Kibria, suspended over similar charges of irregularities, are made accused in all the cases.
The other four charged with irregularities are record keeper Sarwar Hossain and train number trackers Ismail Hossain, Sohel Rana and Shahida Akter.
ACC last week completed an investigation into the recruitment under three categories -- train number taker, goods assistant and record keeper -- and found that the accused had been involved in altering answer scripts and tampering with tabulation sheets.
The railway's east zone recruited 10 people as train number taker and one each to the posts of goods assistant and record keeper in March 2012, ACC sources said.
The investigation team had interrogated the candidates whose answer sheets were altered, an ACC official told The Daily Star, requesting anonymity. The candidates admitted that they had been given appointment in exchange of bribes.
"We seized all the answer sheets. In some answer sheets, we found figures of marks obtained were overwritten without any signature of the examiners" he said.
Giving examples, another ACC official said that at the top of an answer paper, the figure was changed from six to 39.5. In another, the total of obtained marks was 20 at first, which was then changed to 29 and five was added as grace number to make it 34.
Widespread irregularities and corruption in the railway came to light when Ali Azam, driver of former railway minister Suranjit Sengupta's assistant personal secretary Omar Faruq Talukder, pulled over Faruq's microbus at the Pilkhana headquarters of Border Guard Bangladesh in the wee hours of April 9 last year and hollered that there was illegal money in the vehicle.
Upon search, BGB personnel found Tk 70 lakh reportedly collected from job seekers.
Comments