Four cops try to extort IT startup staff, suspended

GHAZIABAD: Four UP Police constables have been suspended and booked for wrongfully confining a group of five youngsters inside a police outpost in Ghaziabad to extort money from them. The men, who run an IT startup in Noida’s Sector 65, had been held captive inside the Niti Khand police outpost of Indirapuram on the night of July 22 after being picked up from their office.

According to the police, the four cops were part of a special operations group (SOG) constituted to control crime in the district and were attached to the crime branch of the Ghaziabad police.

The youngsters — Vaibhav Goyal, Aman Garg, Sarang Das, Pratyag Dixit and Nikhil — are engineers in their early 20s and mid-20s and work for Vsquare Technoserve, an IT firm, which operates out of the ground floor of a three-storey building in Noida’s Sector 65.

The cops allegedly went to the IT firm’s office around 2am on Sunday when the men were working on a night shift. Vaibhav’s father,

Vikas Goyal

(55), who lives in Mohan Nagar, told TOI, that the cops were in plainclothes and had gone to the Noida office in a white Bolero SUV. The plainclothesmen said the firm’s employees were engaged in forgery and fraudulent work according to information provided to them by the

United States

’ FBI.

“They accused the firm’s employees of being involved in nefarious activities and threatened to bump them off in an encounter if they did not pay up extortion money,” Goyal, a civil engineer, said. The cops confiscated the mobile phones of the five men and took them to the Niti Khand police outpost in the Bolero. The five men were taken to the Indirapuram police station following the intervention of SHO Sunil Kumar Dubey and were later released. A report in this regard was submitted to Ghaziabad SSP Hari Narayan Singh who suspended the four cops identified as Shrikant, Narayan Singh, Sudhir Kumar and Shamim on Monday night.

An FIR was registered against the four cops at Indirapuram police station on Wednesday following an inquiry. The case has been registered under IPC sections 342 (wrongful confinement) and 385 (extortion). Indirapuram CO, DSP Sudesh Gupta, said they were suspended immediately after the incident came to light.