JOIN USWith the arrest of five men on June 3, Delhi Police busted one of the biggest illegal organ transplant rackets in the country – run from the premises of Delhi’s prestigious Indraprastha Apollo Hospital.
Among the five arrested two were personal assistants of two Apollo doctors, triggering suspicion that more hospital staffers, including the doctors, may have been involved.
Thirteen people including donors, middlemen and the kingpin Rajkumar Rao have been arrested in the case so far. For the first time on June 23, police also arrested an organ recipient from a hospital in central Delhi. He had come there for check-up.
The recipient is believed to have paid Rs 25 lakh for the kidney transplant, of which Rs 3 lakh was paid to the Kanpur-based donor, says police.
Efforts are on to nab more recipients in connection with the case. “The recipients are spread all over the country. We have identified some of them and police teams are being dispatched to nab them. The recipients are located in Kolhapur, Nagpur, Jaipur, Chandigarh, Chennai and Jammu,” says a Delhi Police officer.
The racket, interestingly, was unearthed when police got to know about a fight outside Apollo between a man and his wife. The husband had sold her kidney to a middleman, says police sources.
She told police that her husband had convinced her to donate her kidney to an unidentified recipient in exchange of a good amount of money. But they later fought over sharing the money.
The couple were taken to the police station at Sarita Vihar. There the woman kidney donor Moumita told police that her husband Devashish Moulik had promised her Rs 3 lakh
if she sold her kidney. “She had agreed to do so, but she received only half of the
promised amount after donating her kidney,” says a police officer.
Moulik told police that he had agreed to sell his own kidney to a middleman and had collected the money in advance. Unfortunately, his kidney did not match the recipient and so he had persuaded his wife to sell hers.
“As we questioned the two, more information was obtained and in the subsequent raid other members of the gang were also nabbed,” the police officer says.
The arrest of the five accused led to the recovery of fake ID documents such as voter and Aadhaar cards.
The entire documentation and verification process for organ transplant was bypassed by using forged papers. These related to recipient’s relationship with donor, Id and address proof, proof of marriage and clearance of the case by hospital’s internal authorisation committee, police say. The papers were faked to show that the kidney donors and relatives were relatives, when they were actually strangers involved in an illegal transaction.
Bigger than imagined
Questioning of the five people initially arrested arrested, police got to know about the magnitude of their operation and also about T Rajukumar Rao, the kingpin of the racket.
“The gang used to lure poor people from various states, including Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, to donate their kidneys for a sum of Rs 2.5-3 lakh each in Delhi, while the recipients were asked to pay Rs 25-30 lakh.
The doctors’ PAs and touts received Rs 50,000 each,” says a police officer.
Rao was arrested on June 7 in a raid by the Delhi Police at Rajarhat in West Bengal's North 24 Parganas district. Police say he confessed that the racket spanned several countries including Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Singapore and involved middlemen, organ donors and their recipients, and that he and his team of accomplices had a target of over 100 recipients.
Rao had middlemen in parts of Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka where they targeted poor people in need of money. Some Sri Lankan nationals were also being brought in India via Chennai for organ donation, sources say.
He travelled abroad looking for kidney recipients. At the time of his arrest Rao told police that he was in touch with 25 recipients and had taken an advance from them.
Amidst allegations by the families of the accused that senior hospital staffers, including doctors, are also involved in the racket, police have zeroed in on the 10 doctors, who are part of Apollo Hospital's internal assessment committee for transplant surgeries, for questioning.
The committee comprises senior doctors working at the hospital, independent doctors and a government doctor. “We are gathering more information about the entire process through which the committee clears a person for organ donation. Soon the doctors will be questioned,” says a police officer.
Police have also served notice to five heads of department at the hospital and asked them to join the investigation. Police have so far come across five cases of kidney transplants conducted in Delhi through this racket. The accused disclosed during interrogation that 10-15 more transplants have been done at Jalandhar and Coimbatore in the past two years.
Apollo Hospital itself has denied involvement in the racket, saying that it was a “victim" of a well-orchestrated operation.