A day after the Supreme Court ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to probe all cases related to the Vyapam scam and over 40 deaths linked to it, more details about the involvement of Madhya Pradesh High Court judges and top ranking government officials into another admission scam here have now come to the fore.

A list of top High Court judges with alleged links to the murkier Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board (MPPEB) recruitment scam, also called the Vyapam scam, has been handed over in a sealed envelope to the Chief Justice of India.

Whistleblowers have told the apex court that the ‘kith and kin’ of judges, IAS and IPS officers are among those who bought seats in private institutions, medical and dental colleges.

Whistleblower Anand Rai said that he and some others had submitted the names of judges linked to the admissions scam in private colleges to Chief Justice HL Duttu in a sealed envelope.

On the basis of these documents, the whistleblowers have reportedly contended before the apex court that since the “kith and kin” of judges are beneficiaries, the judiciary in Madhya Pradesh cannot be objective in the hearing of the admission scam

The whistleblowers also informed the Supreme court about the threats to their lives in their resolve to expose the ‘big fish’ in the Vyapam scam, including Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan.

Whistleblowers also alleged that the scam is not just confined to government institutions, paid seats were given out in private medical and dental colleges to relatives of ministers, judges and bureaucrats.

There have been over 40 deaths in the scandal, in which thousands of people are alleged to have paid bribes in return for government jobs or for college admissions.

The Supreme Court yesterday said that the CBI would investigate the scandal as well as the deaths linked to it.

Nearly 2,000 people have been arrested since the scandal erupted in 2012, including a former state minister, several top bureaucrats and hundreds of students.

The top court also yesterday issued notice to the MP Governor Ram Naresh Yadav while responding to a petition seeking his removal. He and his son were accused last year of accepting bribes in a First Information Report or FIR by the Special Task Force of the state police that is investigating the Vyapam scam.

A sessions court has upheld the jail term of a man convicted of driving his car in drunken condition, saying he was like a “dead unconscious” man behind the wheels who posed “mortal danger not only to himself but also to all other persons using the road”.

Additional Sessions Judge Amit Bansal, while dismissing the appeal of Nikhil Shankar, a resident of Karol bagh here, against the two-day jail term awarded to him by a trial court, said, “He was a menace to the public at large” and such conduct must be deprecated.

“The quantum of alcohol content in blood of the convict was very high i.e. 17 times of permissible limit. He, in these circumstances, could be stated to be almost a dead unconscious man behind the wheels who posed a mortal danger not only to himself but also to all other persons using the road.

“He was thus a menace to the public at large. Such type of conduct of appellant/convict must be strongly deprecated and cannot be condoned under any circumstance,” the judge said.

The court refused to show leniency towards Nikhil and said that the fact that he was heavily drunk is itself aggravating circumstance which does not warrant any leniency from court.

“Keeping in view the circumstances in which the present offence was committed, the convict is not entitled to be released on probation of good conduct and thus his plea in this regard is declined,” it said, adding that the trial court had already been lenient by awarding only a two-day jail term.

The court’s decision came on the plea of Nikhil, who was found driving a car in a drunken condition with alcohol content of 524.1 mg per 100 ml blood which was more than the permissible limit of 30 mg per 100 ml blood.

In its May 11 order, the magisterial court had, besides jailing him, imposed a fine of Rs 2,000 and had impounded his driving licence for a year. Nikhil had challenged only the sentence.

In his appeal, he had argued that the trial court had passed a very harsh sentence after convicting him under section 185 (drunken driving) of the Motor Vehicle Act.

Nikhil, who is working as a sales executive in a garment shop, had sought leniency from the sessions court, saying he was a first-time offender and has a two-year-old daughter to look after.

A major breakthrough was achieved in locating the missing Dornier aircraft after the flight recorder along with the debris of the Indian Coast Guard plane was recovered on Friday.

After an extensive search operation scouring sea and land areas for 33 days, the remains of the ill-fated plane were found off Tamil Nadu coast at a depth of 950 metres.

“The debris were located by ROV Support Vessel, Olympic Canyon, through TX detected by INS Sindhudhwaj,” Principal spokesperson, Ministry of Defence, Sitanshu Kar tweeted.

However, there is no information about the plane’s three crew-members.

The Coast Guard Dornier plane, CG-791, had taken off for a routine maritime surveillance sortie in coastal Tamil Nadu on June 8.

It was believed to have crashed into the sea near the Goa coast and since then was untraceable despite the Coast Guard and the Navy undertaking a massive search operation in the sea and the land areas.