Mumbai: A special Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) court on Thur-sday extended the police custody of two accused, arrested in connection with accepting a bribe for granting a no-objection certificate (NOC) to clear the file of a kidney patient so that he could receive the kidney from one of his relatives till October 6.
The ACB on October 2 arrested social worker at JJ Hospital, Tushar Savarkar, and organ transplant coordinator at S.L. Raheja Hospital, Sachin Salve, for allegedly accepting a sum of Rs 80,000 as bribe from a patient who required kidney transplantation.
The ACB judge extended the police custody of both the accused till October 6, after special public prosecutor Sunil Gonsalves argued that the police needed to find out if any other committee members were also involved in the bribery case.
He further contended that Salve was appointed as coordinator in 2017 and had cleared 550 files for organ transplantation till date and that the police needed to probe whether he had accepted a bribe in any other case, as well. It was claimed before the court that one witness had come forward who was claiming to have paid Rs 10,000 as bribe to the accused to get a file of organ transplant cleared expeditiously.
According to the prosecution, there is a government-appointed authorisation committee at state-run JJ Hospital, which grants permission for organ transplantation after going through all the required documents.
One Jamaluddin Amirullah had approached the committee, as both his kidneys had failed and one of his female relatives had agreed to donate him one of her kidneys.
According to the police, due to the requirement of some documents, the committee kept pending the issuance of NOC to Amirullah. However, Mr Savarkar allegedly approached Ziauddin Siddiqui, Amirullah’s friend, and asked for a Rs 1.5 lakh bribe for issuance of NOC.
