New Delhi: Three of the suspects arrested for the international kidney racket busted by Uttar Pradesh Police this year are history-sheeters who were out on bail in similar cases, ThePrint has learnt.
According to officers in Kanpur police, which is investigating the latest racket, T. Rajkumar Rao, the Kolkata-based alleged mastermind, was arrested by Delhi Police in an alleged kidney sale racket at Apollo Hospital in 2016. Junaid Ahmed Khan and Saboor Ahmad of Lucknow, meanwhile, were nabbed the same year for a suspected kidney racket operating from Punjab’s Jalandhar, the sources added.
The Kanpur Crime Branch has so far arrested 12 people, including the CEO of Delhi’s PSRI Hospital, Dr Deepak Shukla, and a transplant coordinator at Fortis Hospital, Faridabad, in connection with the fresh racket, which was busted this February.
They have been rounded up from Badarpur, Lakhimpur Kheri, Lucknow, Kanpur and New Delhi, with the tentacles of the racket suspected to have also ensnared foreign recipients.
As part of the racket, donors were allegedly offered Rs 2.5-5 lakh on average. The recipient families, desperate to save a grievously-ill relative in dire need of a healthy kidney, were allegedly charged Rs 22.5 lakh to Rs 80 lakh.
The bulk of this sum is believed to have been distributed among a well-oiled network of doctors, touts and hospitals at pre-decided ratios.
It was the lure of this big-ticket cash that brought offenders back to the crime, Kanpur superintendent of police (south) Ravina Tyagi, who was earlier monitoring the special investigation team formed to probe the scam, told ThePrint.
“The amount of money they end up making is tempting, which is why they are comfortable committing the crime time and again and there is no sense of remorse,” Tyagi added.
Arrested on his wedding anniversary
Rao allegedly came into contact with kidney racketeers years ago, and even donated a kidney in Coimbatore to invest in the racket, Delhi Police officials told ThePrint.
Describing his alleged modus operandi during the earlier racket, police officials said Rao would visit hospitals in Delhi as a medical representative. During these rounds, he is alleged to have tied up with two personal assistants working for a nephrologist at Indraprastha Apollo Hospital.
Advertisements for kidney donors were subsequently issued at regular intervals in Bengali and Bangladeshi daily newspapers, the Delhi Police officers said, with two to three mobile numbers listed in the contact information.
Rao was arrested from Kolkata on 7 June 2016, while he was celebrating his wedding anniversary, the sources said.
Speaking to ThePrint, deputy commissioner of police (South Delhi) Chinmay Biswal said that the chargesheet in Rao’s case was filed in 2016, and that he was released on bail the same year.
The trial, he added, was yet to begin, with the directorate of health yet to submit some details about the doctors allegedly involved in the racket. “Since the directorate of health hasn’t submitted the details in court, the trial has not begin,” Biswal said.
The official spokesperson for Indraprastha Apollo Hospital told ThePrint that the hospital was “extending all co-operation with the police on the matter”.
Rao is also suspected to have been a member of the gang that operated in Jalandhar in 2014-15, whose discovery in 2016 led to the earlier arrest of Junaid and Saboor.
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‘Friends in crime’
Junaid and Saboor, both from Lucknow, were friends and it was the former who introduced Saboor to organised crime, sources in Jalandhar police told ThePrint.
Both were arrested in 2016.
According to the sources, Junaid, who is in his late 30s, had told Jalandhar police at the time that he used to arrange donors and forge identity proofs. He is also believed to have alleged that the owner of National Kidney Hospital, Jalandhar, Dr Rajesh Agarwal, was “in the know of this”.
The investigation then, the sources said, had revealed that Junaid himself was introduced to the racket by another friend, Gaurav Misra, who is also an accused in the Kanpur case.
He is said to have brought Junaid to the hospital to donate a kidney, with the transaction earning the latter Rs 3.5 lakh and Misra Rs 10 lakh. Attracted by the big sum Misra earned, Junaid also started arranging donors, the investigation found.
It was the same promise of easy big money that lured Saboor, also in his late 30s, into the net.
Jatinder Arora, counsel for Junaid in the Jalandhar kidney racket, told ThePrint that the money was too good for people to walk away even after being caught, echoing the Delhi Police officer.
“There is a huge chain and most of these people don’t get scared to engage in the crime again due to the huge money it offers,” he said.
According to him, the case spawned an 855-page chargesheet that identifies 30 people as accused. Charges in the case are yet to be framed.
While Junaid got bail in October 2016, the same month he was arrested, Saboor was out the same year too.
Speaking to ThePrint, Dr Rajesh Agarwal’s wife Deepa Agarwal, also a doctor and an accused in the case, pleaded innocence.
“It is the fault of these touts, because of whom we became victims. Now, doctors of PSRI and Fortis are suffering,” she said.
The National Kidney Hospital, the suspected hub of the scam, shut down soon after the controversy, although owners claim it stood on rented premises and they are now running another multi-speciality hospital in Jalandhar. Dr Rajesh Agarwal, who is currently on bail, was traveling and was not available for comment.
The case
The latest kidney racket was busted by Kanpur police in February, allegedly after getting a tip-off on a gang casually discussing their plot at a local restaurant.
The charge against the doctors and officials arrested is that they lured donors from economically weaker backgrounds on the pretext of money and jobs. And they did so via a professional network of touts, local middlemen and hospital staff.
A private practitioner named Dr Ketan Kaushik, who remains at large, is believed to have been the “global face” of the racket, drawing customers from countries as far as Turkey.
Sources in Kanpur police told ThePrint that the racket’s international role had even come up during his interrogation by Delhi Police in 2016.
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