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Shimla, July 28: A group of parents on a three-day jaunt to Dehra Dun in summer should have raised no suspicions, even if they were from equally pleasant Himachal Pradesh.

Except that the day after they returned, their children sat for the Himachal medical entrance and all finished near the top ? despite poor results in past exams.

A technology used to track terror suspects has helped take the lid off a question paper leak in the state after a government probe failed to find evidence of foul play.

Suspicion had been raised as soon as the results of the May 26 test were published on June 3. As many as 38 top-ranked students had never done well before, and four of them lived in the same Shimla neighbourhood.

But evidence was hard to come by till the mobile geo-mapping (MGM) technology provided a lead. MGM allows a mobile service provider to pinpoint a subscriber’s location and movement even if the phone is switched off. It revealed a remarkable coincidence ? the parents of most of the 38 students had quietly slipped off to Dehra Dun in Uttaranchal on May 23 and returned together on May 25.

After the results were announced, some parents and social workers had formed an action committee and submitted memorandums to the chief minister, vice-chancellor and the state police chief. The government formed a single-member probe that came out with a clean chit.

On June 15, the parents moved the high court, which on June 22 asked the government to form another probe headed by the inspector-general of the state police’s criminal investigation department. It was this committee that thought of using MGM. The lead provided by the technology prompted the team to have a look at the 38 suspects’ answer sheets.

“The investigation showed most of them hadn’t done any rough work while solving the math questions. They had clearly crammed the answers,” a source said.

All 38 students were asked to solve the same question paper again ? and only four succeeded.

The committee’s report prompted the high court on July 26 to order the exam scrapped and an FIR registered.

The probe suggests the paper was leaked from a Lucknow press and the racketeers sold copies to the parents, at prices between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 20 lakh, in Dehra Dun.

The police have scanned the mobile records of the parents to try and identify the racketeers, but no arrests have yet been made.

Police sources said the same racket could be behind a leak in a recent Punjab exam, whose papers were also printed at the same Lucknow press.