Days after the Delhi Police busted an inter-state kidney racket involved in illegal kidney trade, the police on Tuesday arrested the mastermind T RajKumar Rao from Kolkata. The Delhi Police also arrested three donors, including two women, on Tuesday making a major headway in the illegal kidney trade case.
On Monday, five persons including two personal assistants (PAs) of a nephrologist at Apollo Hospital were arrested who allegedly lured poor people from various states into selling kidneys.
Rao, 40, was already under police the scanner for running such rackets in Jalandhar, Coimbatore and Hyderabad. His name was revealed by the five middlemen who were earlier arrested by the Delhi Police, the Press Trust of India reported.
A senior police official told PTI that Rao is also believed to be associated with similar rackets in Nepal, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. "He will be produced before a court there and brought to Delhi on transit remand," the official said.
Meanwhile, the Delhi Police will also quiz 10 doctors from the Apollo Hospital, Delhi, who were a part of the internal assessment committee at the hospital and cleared the cases for kidney donation and harvesting.
The kidney donors arrested earlier included a married couple who told the Delhi Police that they felt cheated when they came to know that their kidneys are being sold at much higher prices than they were paid, a police official privy to the investigation was quoted by the PTI as saying.
The Apollo Hospital has also constituted an independent probe panel to be headed by former chief justice of Punjab and Haryana High Court, Mukul Mudgal . The panel would also comprise a forensic expert and various medical professionals, the Times of India reported.
The Apollo Hospital, while pleading not guilty in the case, has said that it was duped by organ traffickers into conducting kidney transplant procedures. The hospital said in a statement that the traffickers posed as relatives of the needy patients and produced fake/ forged documents before the hospital authorities to mint money from the patients.
