2 More Charged in Exam Thefts at UCI

A criminal investigation of a UC Irvine exam-theft ring has expanded to include two more students.

Kambiz Beniamia Omidi and Bahram Ahmadi, both 21-year-old seniors, were named in a complaint charging that they and Amir Bagherzadeh, 22, conspired to burglarize offices at the university to steal tests “for the purpose of later taking the examinations without doing the required course work and thereby receiving academic credit for such courses,” court documents said.

The complaint also accuses Bagherzadeh and Omidi of receiving stolen property.

The new charges were revealed during a brief hearing for Bagherzadeh at Harbor Municipal Court in Newport Beach. Further action in his case was delayed while arrest warrants for the other two students were sought.

Efforts to reach the students were unsuccessful.

Bagherzadeh was arrested in February after he allegedly used a key issued to the student security force to enter the office of the chairman of molecular biology and biochemistry department. Bagherzadeh, a member of that security force at the time, has pleaded innocent to the charges.

Police say they caught Bagherzadeh and another student, Arash Behnam, on Feb. 2 outside Room 431 at Steinhaus Hall, where the midterm examinations for Molecular Biology 107 were kept.

The test in Molecular Biology 107 was scheduled for later in the day. But instead of finding the test for that class, the students found a dummy exam and a trap set by police, Police Chief Mike Michell said during an interview in February.

Shortly before he was to be arraigned in February, Behnam was found dead in a Tijuana hotel with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest, authorities said. Police believe the arrest was a factor in the death of Behnam, a foreign student from Iran.

In the amended complaint filed in the Bagherzadeh case, authorities say that a search of Omidi’s home turned up a master key to offices in the physical sciences building as well as “numerous copies of midterm examinations.”