A day after the Delhi police busted an inter-state kidney racket and arrested five persons connected to it, highly-placed sources revealed that one of the videos from the documentation and verification of donors and recipients for the Apollo Hospital Internal Authorisation Committee showed a woman donor saying that she did not have any relative or family but was still cleared for organ donation. As per the Transplant of Human Organ Act, a donor can only donate organs to a family member or relative.
“The whole procedure of medical tests of recipient and donor and their documentation and verification before transplantation has to be mandatorily videographed. One such video seized by us shows a woman donor denying having any relatives but later she was cleared for donating her kidney to the recipient. This puts a lot of suspicion on the doctors of the hospital that were part of the committee. There is a high chance that they may have links with the touts but we will investigate further to be completely sure,” sources said.
The investigators have currently identified at least three recipients and five donors at Apollo Hospital who are said to be from Ghaziabad (UP), Jammu and Kashmir and Mah-arashtra. The donors were shown as the wife, brother, father of recipients through fraudulently-made documents, sources said.
From the interrogation of the arrested persons, it has emerged that at least 10 kidney transplants last year in Coimbatore alone were part of the racket.
Meanwhile, the police is still trying to track the alleged kingpin of the racket, T. Rajukumar Rao. Police sources have claimed that Rajukumar was last traced to a location in Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, and multiple raids have also been simultaneously conducted in various parts of the country.
The police suspects there may be people higher up in the chain running the operation and Rajukumar, who had allegedly managed the entire operations along with his accomplice Aseem Sikdar, may not be the mastermind of this entire racket which allegedly runs in various states.
