Bhubaneswar:
A Kerala police team investigating a man suspected to be Bitti Mohanty, a rape convict on the run for six years, today said that he had forged his educational certificates to take the identity of Raghav Ranjan.
The team went to the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) in Bhubaneswar, where Bitti Mohanty finished BTech in 2004, and met the vice-chancellor and other officials. Interestingly, the police team found that Bitti's BTech certificate matches that of Raghav Rajan's in all aspects - both did engineering from the same university in Bhubaneswar in the same year - except that the latter's records don't exist in the university records.
Later, it checked on Cuttack's Stewart School and Christ College, where Bitti Mohanty studied before joining KIIT.
"We are convinced that all his certificates in the name of Raghav Rajan are forged," said Jose Joseph, who is leading the police team.
The team may also question Bitti Mohanty's father BB Mohanty, former Director General (Home Guard) of Odisha. His house in Cuttack, however, was locked today.
Far away in Rajasthan, the man suspected to be Bitti Mohanty was shifted from Alwar to Jaipur. He had arrived in Alwar yesterday after a two-day train journey from Kannur in Kerala under police watch.
Bitti Mohanty was convicted in March 2006 for raping a 26-year-old German national in a hotel in Alwar, Rajasthan. On November 20, after spending seven months in jail, he was allowed to leave prison on parole on the plea that his mother in Odisha was unwell and wanted to meet him. He has been missing ever since.
Police say the man arrested in Kannur on March 8 this year is Bitti Mohanty, and that he had reinvented himself as Raghav Rajan, taught at a school in Andhra Pradesh, completed an MBA in Kerala and taken up a job in a bank.
The man was arrested after an anonymous letter warned his bosses at the bank that he was wanted in a rape case in Rajasthan.