By IANS
New Delhi/Kathmandu/Toronto : With India’s ‘Dr Kidney’ Amit Kumar, the alleged mastermind of a multi-billion dollar kidney transplant scam, finally in the net, India and Nepal Friday began moves to bring him to justice in their countries.
India started efforts to extradite Amit Kumar from Nepal, with which it has friendly relations but an as-yet incomplete extradition treaty.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which has been tasked with the investigations into the kidney racket, Friday evening formally registered a case against Amit Kumar and two others. Officials said Amit, Upendra and Sartaj were booked for violating the Organs Transplant Act, in over 600 cases.
Nepal also opened legal proceedings against Amit Kumar, but on charges of violating the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, which could get him four years in prison and a fine of over Nepali Rs.4 million (approx $630,000). He was arrested from a jungle resort in picturesque Chitwan Thursday evening after a two-week hunt, with foreign currency worth nearly Nepali Rs.15 million.
India and Nepal had initialled an extradition treaty in January 2005, which was expected to be signed later by the home ministers of the two countries.
The treaty could not, however, be signed due to some lingering differences over portions of the draft. Invoking it to spur extradition of Kumar may not help, an official said.
Confident of overcoming legal hurdles even though there was no formal extradition treaty between the two countries, India’s Minister of State for Home Sri Prakash Jaiswal said: “We have very good relations with our neighbour Nepal… It will not be a problem in extraditing Dr Amit Kumar.”
“We have taken up the issue of Dr Amit Kumar with the Nepali government. We are confident that due to our close relations with Nepal, the Nepali government could send Kumar to India sooner rather than later,” a top official told IANS.
“Strictly speaking, as we don’t have an operational extradition treaty with Nepal, we are invoking the Interpol red corner notice to get Kumar back to India. Nepal is a signatory to the Interpol,” the official added.
As the long hands of the law began to close in on the fugitive kingpin of a multimillion-rupee scam that stretched to various countries and saw at least 600 illegal transplants, the man himself appeared before the press in Kathmandu – defiant and unapologetic.
“It’s wrong,” fumed the 43-year-old in a black leather jacket and with his hair cut short, referring to his arrest and being put into police custody.
“I have not done anything wrong. I have not duped anyone,” Amit Kumar, alias Santosh Rameshwar Raut, added.
“He was very confident,” said Deputy Superintendent of Police Sher Bahadur Basnet, who had headed the special team of Metropolitan Police that rushed to the Wildlife Lodge in Chitwan Thursday to arrest the fugitive.
Amit Kumar had told police he had come to Chitwan to explore the possibility of opening a kidney transplant centre there.
Last year, the Nepal police busted three major kidney transplant scams in which the victims were taken to Chennai, Chandigarh and Lucknow with promises of lucrative jobs.
If Amit Kumar is linked to any of them, he will be tried in accordance with Nepal’s laws in the Himalayan state first.
Only after the legal formalities are complete in Nepal is he likely to be handed over to the Indian authorities.
But Indian forces would like to get him quickly, of course.
India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Director Vijay Shankar said that efforts would be made for his immediate extradition.
“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.
Away from the legalese and the efforts of two governments to catch him, were the human faces behind the racket.
Early Friday, police in Delhi’s satellite town of Gurgaon, where the scam was finally unearthed on Jan 24, raided an apartment and rescued four victims whose kidneys were removed in a critical condition.
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.
And in Canada, his wife Poonam Ameet and her two young boys seemed to have fled from their palatial home in Brampton. When an IANS correspondent reached their upscale home at 14 Pali Drive Thursday evening, a woman neighbour said Amit Kumar’s wife “might have gone out with her sons”.
The garage driveway was cleared of snow and there seemed to be fresh tyre marks on it, confirming movement outside the house for the first time in two weeks.
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.