Journalist held for impersonating Yogi Adityanath: Cops

A freelance journalist was arrested for allegedly impersonating Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and sending forged letters to several public sector units in a bid to obtain advertisements for his newspaper in 2016 police said on SundayAdityanath was then a Lok Sabha MP from GorakhpurAccused Manoj Kumar Seth 41 was arrested from his native Bhubaneshwar in Odisha by the Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations IFSO unit of Delhi Polices Special Cell they saidRajbhushan Singh Rawat personal secretary to Adityanath had filed a police complaint alleging that some unknown persons had created a fake email ID using the BJP leaderrsquos credentialsAccording to Rawat the accused had sent emails and forged letters to public sector units such as Power Grid Corporation of India ONGC and GAIL India The accused also attached scanned letters with forged signatures of AdityanathDeputy Commissioner of Police IFSO KPS Malhotra said during the course of the investigation the fake email ID yogiadityanathmpgmailcom was identified and its contents were analysed to understand the motiveThe alleged email was with a request to release advertisements in favour of an English newspaper Similarly fake emails and fake letters were sent to ONGC and GAIL for advertisement support in favour of another newspaper Through the IP address analysis and human intelligence we identified the accused as Manoj Kumar Seth Malhotra saidPolice said Sethrsquos plan had not been successful and that he had been continuously changing his hideouts to evade investigators since then Though several raids were conducted at his possible hideouts he managed to give the police a slip every timeA dedicated team headed by ACP Raman was constituted to nab him police saidldquoOn Friday Seth was arrested from Bhubaneshwar by our team and during interrogation he revealed that he is a freelance journalist and also publishes a fortnightly newspaper He had created the fake email ID and prepared the forged letters to seek advertisement support in favour of his local newspapers Malhotra saidSeth is also involved in a case of extortion in 2020 at Chaliya Ganj police station in Cuttack on the complaint of an executive engineer of the public works department Odisha police saidThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever