Nearly two months after a fake vaccination racket rocked Kolkata and its suburbs, the city police on Thursday filed a chargesheet against eight accused, including Debanjan Deb who posed as an IAS officer.
The police had charged them under 14 Sections, including Section 307 (attempt to murder) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and 51(b) of the Disaster Management Act, 2005.
The seven other accused named in the chargesheet include Mr. Deb’s employees and associates. The chargesheet, which runs over 1,000 pages and refers to 130 witnesses, was filed before the additional chief judicial magistrate of the Alipore court on Thursday.
The accused have also been charged with other Sections of the IPC, including 120(B) (criminal conspiracy), 420 (cheating) and 170 (personating as public servant) and 274 (adulteration of drugs). The chargesheet has been filed with a prayer under sub-Section(8) of Section 173 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC).
Mr. Deb, 28, who posed as a fake IAS officer and at times as the Joint Commissioner of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation had administered fake vaccines to more than 800 persons at different camps in Kasba and other areas in Kolkata . The vaccines were made up of antibiotics and steroids.
He was arrested on June 23 after Trinamool Congress MP Mimi Chakraborty, who was present at one of camps, raised an alarm and informed the police. Mr. Deb had built a fake profile both in the political circles of the city and over social media over a period of several months, and had interacted with several political functionaries of the Trinamool Congress.
The accused went to the extent of erecting a plaque with his name on a Rabindranath Tagore bust, which was brought down by the city’s civic body.
