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Canadian links to global kidney racket
By Mata Press Service
Indian police are tracking several Canadians who are believed to have bought kidneys from a syndicate run by four doctors outside the capital city of New Delhi.
The doctors, who supplied the organs to national and international clients, were operating secretly from a residential apartment in Gurgaon and made over 600 poor people part with their kidneys.
A Gurgaon police official told The South Asian Post that they believe one of the key suspects involved in the racket is an Indo-Canadian.
“He is a frequent flier between India and Canada and may have been arranging for the patients to come here,” he said.
“We are going through the records at a guest house where the patients from overseas were staying . . . there are several Canadian addresses in the register.”
He said police would make contact with the names of the people in the register as the investigation continues.
Gurgaon Police Commissioner Mahender Lal told IANS that the doctors — Amit Verma, kingpin behind the illicit trade, and Jiwan Kumar (both surgeons), Upendra Kumar (physician) and Saraj Kumar (anaesthesiologist) — had been arrested three times before on the charges of illegal human organ transplants in Delhi, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra.
One of them — Upendra Kumar — has been arrested in the recent case. The other three have gone into hiding.
Lal said: “We have sounded an alert at all airports and seaports across the country to make sure that the accused doctors don’t flee the country. We suspect that Amit might be a Canadian NRI (non-resident Indian) as he visits that country very often.”
Police officials say that Dr. Verma was earlier active in Mumbai where he allegedly went by the name of Santosh Raut.
Verma fled Mumbai in 1993 after jumping bail and since then has been illegally active in Jaipur and Hyderabad.
Lal said documents recovered from the guesthouse suggest that the doctors had clients from Lebanon, Dubai, the U.S., Canada, Britain, Saudi Arabia, and Greece.
“In the past eight-nine years, they have removed the kidneys of more than 600 underprivileged people of Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh on the pretext of giving them jobs, money, and even threatening them at gun point,” Lal said.
“They used to pay the victims a paltry amount of Rs.50,000 to Rs.100,000 (C$1,200 and C$2,400), but were charging between Rs.1 million to Rs.2 million (C$25,000 to C$50,000) from their national and international clients,” Lal told reporters.
A man who was rescued by police told IANS: “I was brought here after being told that I would be given a job. Then I was taken to the hospital and told that I would have to undergo a medical examination as per government rules before I can be employed.”“But at night someone came to me and said my kidney would be removed and I would be paid Rs.50,000 for it. I was told I would be killed if I refused to undergo the operation.”
Lal said: “The doctors used to send their agents to Meerut, Moradabad and Ghaziabad to identify healthy people who could be used for the illegal kidney racket.”
Arrested doctor Upendra, in his interrogation, revealed that they had converted a car into a lab, where their agents used to collect and test blood samples to identify possible victims.“We have seized the car,” Lal said. The police also detained five foreigners — identified as Joy Mehtal, 53, his wife Sonam Joy, 52, a U.S.-based NRI couple, and three Greek citizens, Leonida Dayasi, 56, Leonidas Dayasi, 63, and Heleni Kitcocy, 53, all nabbed at the guest house run by the doctors.
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