Nellore: Tirumala police arrested 9 persons for selling fake break darshan tickets for Rs 5,000 each using duplicate donor passbooks. The accused have been identified as Karanam Venugopal alias Kulakarni of Beedar in Karnataka, Venkatesh, Raju, K. Venkatachalapati of Tirupati along with five others. They prepared fake letters of several IAS officers.

With the help of Dharmaiah, working as Superintendent in TTD, they used to obtain VIP break darshan tickets using fake letter pads and sell them for Rs 4,000-Rs 5,000 and share the money. Later, they have started printing fake donor passbooks as obtaining VIP darshan tickets with the IAS officer letters became difficult. They sent a passbook belonging to a devotee in Coimbatore to Hyderabad to design similar book with the help of some computer professionals.

Tirumala police launched a probe and held the nine accused after Andhra Bank staff caught hold of a group, when the VIP tickets they produced did not get scanned properly and even the bar codes on the shown tickets were found wrong in the second week of March.