By Sudeshna Sarkar, IANS
Kathmandu : After nabbing Indian kidney racket kingpin Amit Kumar Raut from a resort in tourist destination Chitwan in south Nepal, triumphant Nepal police are now hunting for his brother Jeevan Kumar and other accomplices who could be hiding in the Himalayan state.
Jeevan Kumar, who was his brother’s right hand man at the Star Max Life Care Hospital in Gurgaon town on the outskirts of New Delhi and was entrusted with the post-operative care of transplant patients as well as duped donors, has also gone underground since the massive illegal scam was busted last month.
The three mobile telephone sets Nepal police confiscated from Amit Kumar after arresting him from the Wildlife Lodge in Chitwan Thursday have proved to be a bonanza of information about the people he used to call up after sneaking into Nepal Jan 26 to avoid being arrested by Indian police.
Alerted that the Nepali media was also talking about him, a desperate Amit Kumar tried to flee to Chitwan along the Indo-Nepal border in a bid to probably creep back into India, police said.
Trying to hide the face that was being beamed regularly on the television channels by donning a hat, dark glasses and wrapping a black muffler around it, Amit Kumar seemed to be throwing caution to the winds.
Wildlife Lodge staff said they could hear him screaming on the phone, telling the unseen recipients that he ran a larger risk of being arrested in Nepal than in India.
According to the hotel staff, most of the calls seemed to be local though he also carried a Canadian SIM card.
Like his brother, Jeevan Kumar too had been a frequent visitor to Nepal.
He had hired a contact, a Nepali agent called Pankaj Jha, and assigned him the task of finding a building or plot of land in Nepal so that the Gurgaon kidney factory, which was running the risk of discovery, could be shut down and a new one opened in Nepal, where the laws are more lenient and palms can be greased more easily.
At least one more associate is suspected to have accompanied Amit Kumar to Chitwan.
The fugitive had signed himself as a Nepali, Suresh Regmi, while the associate called himself Manish Singh.
Nepal police are also looking for five more associates of Amit Kumar, including Jha.
These are people who worked at the Gurgaon nursing home as cleaners, ward boys and other operation theatre staff.