Ahmedabad: Gujarat Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) on Wednesday arrested two individuals, including a Bangladeshi national, for allegedly fabricating fake documents to help illegal Bangladeshi immigrants obtain Indian identity papers.

The arrested accused are Mohammad Didarul Alam alias Rana Sarkar, a Bangladeshi citizen, and his Indian associate Shoaib Mohammad Qureshi (from Navalgadh, Rajasthan), while a third suspect, Robiul Islam, is believed to be in South Korea. ATS officials said Alam entered India illegally in 2012 and secured an Indian passport in 2017 using fake documents. He began his document-forging operations in 2018.

During investigations, the ATS found that the accused had used official letterheads belonging to municipal corporators from both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress to fabricate identity documents.

As per the details, on May 12, ATS teams raided Alam’s shop, ‘VIP Mobile and Money Transfer’, in Ahmedabad’s Narol area, recovering several forged IDs including Aadhaar cards, PAN cards, voter IDs, and a Bank of Baroda passbook. In a separate raid on Qureshi’s firm, ‘Al Quraish Enterprise’, investigators seized 22 fake Aadhaar certificates and found over 300 templates for various identity documents stored on computers.

Explaining the forgery method, an ATS officer said the accused used original certificates signed by local corporators, erased the original names with correction fluid, and printed multiple colour copies. They then inserted the names and photographs of Bangladeshi nationals and used these altered documents to apply for Aadhaar cards, PAN cards, voter IDs, and eventually Indian passports.

The ATS revealed that the duo had successfully arranged Indian passports for at least 17 illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, with applications for nine more in process when the racket was uncovered. Additionally, Islam — whose nationality is yet to be confirmed — is currently in South Korea and is believed to have brought 13–14 Bangladeshi nationals to India.

All three accused have been booked under multiple sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), including Sections 336(2), 337, 338, and 340(2), along with provisions of the Passport Act and the Foreigners Act.

These arrests follow Gujarat Police’s massive crackdown on illegal Bangladeshi immigrants that began on April 26, resulting in the detention of over 6,500 suspects across the state. Police continue to scrutinise documents recovered from many of those detained to identify the extent of forged Indian ID distribution. DeshGujarat