Ghaziabad, July 15 (IANS) A 30-year-old Class 8 dropout and a fluent English speaker was arrested for impersonating as a 2007 batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of Bihar cadre in Ghaziabad Thursday, police said.

Suresh Yadav, a resident of Uttar Pradesh’s Sultanpur district, carried a fake ‘Government of India’ identity card showing his designation as district magistrate, police said.

‘Suresh Yadav has studied up to Class 8 and is fluent in English. He is thorough with the bureaucratic system and its structure. So, he managed to befool people quite easily,’ said Senior Superintendent of Police Raghuvir Lal.

‘Yadav used to call police control rooms and pass instructions. Recently, he met state DGP (Director General of Police) Karamveer Singh posing as an IAS officer where he had a 30 minute discussion. He was introduced to the DGP by a Kanpur builder Ram Bahadur,’ Lal said.

He was arrested from a hotel in Ghaziabad where he had been staying for the last 15 days. ‘We tracked two of his numbers and rounded him up,’ Lal said.

Yadav got the identity card (No.051000) made in the name of Jai Singh, mentioning his age as 33 and date of birth as Feb 1, 1977.

The fake ID card specifies his address as 30/3, Lal Darwaja, Ghazipur City, District Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh. The identity card bears Aug 27, 2007 as date of issue.

‘Yadav promised jobs to people and extracted huge amounts of money from them. He cheated a steel plant manager Anil Sharma in Allahabad of Rs.2 lakh after promising him job. He duped two Kanpur-based builders – Santosh Bhadauria and Ram Bahadur – of over Rs.4 lakh,’ Lal said.

Yadav had been apprehended several times in the past and was lodged in different jails. ‘I was sent to jail in 1992, 1994, 1997, 1998, and 2007 and then remained in jails at Vaishali (Bihar) and Alipur (West Bengal) from where I got out some time back,’ he told police.

Yadav changed his area of operation frequently in order to evade arrests. He posed as an IAS officer of Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal cadres.

A case will be registered against him at Indirapuram police station, the SSP said.