Police yet to get leads on woman who sold kidney

More than a month after it came to light that a woman, identified as Rukhsana, had allegedly posed as the sister of Gujarat resident Rasilaben Kathiriya and donated her a kidney, the Powai police is yet to trace her. The police even sent teams to Gujarat’s Kheda district to look for her but was unable to track her.

According to the police, the woman is the wife of Yusuf Shah Diwan, one of the middlemen arrested by the Powai police when they busted the kidney donation racket at Dr LH Hiranandani Hospital in July this year. Diwan had allegedly introduced Shobha Thakur, the kidney donor in the July 15 case, to another middleman Baijendra Bisen. Diwan and Bisen had then promised a sum of money to Thakur and made her pose as Rekha, the wife of Brijkishore Jaiswal, to facilitate the surgery. The Asian Age had reported on August 26 about the alleged fraud involving Rukhsana.

After Diwan's arrest, he revealed that he had turned into a middleman after someone approached him to donate his kidney. “He made his wife pose as Harshaben Kevadiya, sister of Rasilaben Kathiriya, a Gujarat resident. While the original Harshaben's blood tests were used to approve the surgery, it was Rukhsana who donated the kidney. This led to complications and Rasilaben died within a month of her surgery,\" said a police source.

This case came to light after the Directorate of Health Services (DHS) scanned through the records of transplants conducted at the Hiranandani hospital in 2016. \"The DHS submitted to us its findings about this case and we started looking for the fake kidney donor,\" said the source.

The source revealed that teams had even been sent to Nadiad in Gujarat, from where Diwan and his wife hailed, but no one had a clue. “We are still looking for the woman and once we find her we will record her statement,” said the source. The source added that the statement could be included in the chargesheet, which was likely to be filed soon.