By IANS
New Delhi : A police team from Uttar Pradesh and Haryana Friday left for Nepal to seek custody of Amit Kumar, the alleged mastermind of the kidney transplant scam, while their colleagues in Gurgaon rescued four critically ill victims whose kidneys were removed.
“We have sent a team of officials to Nepal with arrest warrants of Amit and sufficient evidence to be produced before the Nepal court. The team would also seek a joint interrogation of Amit with Nepal police, who has arrested him,” Gurgaon Joint Commissioner of Police Mahender Singh Ahlawat told IANS.
Amit Kumar, alias Santosh Rameshwar Raut, the man allegedly behind 600 illegal kidney transplants, was arrested Thursday evening from a hotel near the India-Nepal border and taken to the capital Kathmandu early Friday for interrogation.
Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Director Vijay Shankar said efforts would be made for his immediate extradition.
As the fugitive mastermind was finally nabbed, Gurgaon police raided a flat in the Valley View apartments on the Gurgaon-Faridabad road in the early hours of Friday and rescued four people identified as Dileep, Sayeed, Naresh and Rajender.
Three of them are from Uttar Pradesh and one from Uttarakhand.
Gurgaon Deputy Commissioner of Police Satish Balyan said: “We found the victims in a poor state inside the flats and rushed them immediately to a city hospital. Their condition was stated to be critical.”
“Preliminary investigations suggest that their kidneys were removed by Amit at his Sector-23 hospital on Jan 22 (two days before the police raids). The victims told us that they were lured by a Nepali citizen to the hospital on the pretext of providing them a job, but their kidneys were removed forcefully at Amit’s clinic,” Balyan added.
The Valley View flat was hired by a Yashpal Sharma, reportedly Amit Kumar’s chartered accountant, and was raided after one of the victims somehow managed to come out of the flat and approached police.
Balyan said a team had been dispatched to Chandigarh to nab Sharma.
The racket, which served clients from Britain, the US, Greece, Lebanon, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Dubai, was busted Jan 24 in Gurgaon, an emerging IT hub on the outskirts of the Indian capital.
Kumar and his associates allegedly obtained kidneys illegally or under force from poor people and then transplant them to needy and unsuspecting patients who could pay their exorbitant charges.
Interpol had last week issued a red corner notice for Kumar’s arrest on charges of “illegal transplanting of kidneys, cheating and criminal conspiracy” after he apparently escaped from India following the unearthing of the racket Jan 24.
Upendra Aggrawal, one of the key accused, was arrested from a Faridabad hotel while three other ‘doctors’ including Amit, his brother Jeewan and Saraj Kumar had been absconding.
According to police sources in India, Kumar has eight properties, including one in Australia and a home in Canada. He was reportedly operating at least a couple of dozen banks accounts, where he had stashed around Rs.1 billion.
He is said to own at least eight luxury cars, including a Mercedes, and made frequent trips from Canada – where his family lives – to India only to conduct transplant operations, say police.
“His network was well spread in some foreign countries. Till now, the names of a few people in Turkey, Greece and Ireland he surfaced in the investigations. We are trying to identify them,” a senior police official told IANS.
His family had been traced to an upscale locality in Toronto. However, reports from Canada said that his wife Poonam Ameet and their two sons had slipped out of their home in Brampton.