By IANS,
Mumbai : A Mumbai court Monday granted bail to the two main accused in the multi-million dollar illegal kidney transplant racket, Amit Kumar Raut and his brother Jeevan Kumar Raut.
The two were granted bail on sureties of Rs.15,000 each by Bandra court metropolitan magistrate R. Wankheda after police failed to file a charge-sheet against them within the stipulated 90 days time.
He also served a show cause notice against the investigating officer of the Mahim Police Station in this matter. The duo was brought to Mumbai in July to face trial in the illegal kidney transplant case (No. 113/2005).
According to the police official, the charge-sheet was delayed since another accused, Upendra Agarwal, in the same case (No. 113/2005) could not be brought to Mumbai.
“Dr. Agarwal has been evading us on various excuses and getting himself admitted to hospitals so we could not bring him to face trial in this matter,” the official explained.
Amit Kumar Raut was arrested from Nepal’s Chitwan resort early this year and later handed over to the Indian authorities.
A graduate in ayurveda from Akola, near Nagpur in Maharashtra, Amit, now in his early 50s, was first arrested in 1993 with 12 other medicos, including some from government hospitals, in a raid by Mumbai police on Kaushalya Clinic in Khar, northwest Mumbai.
At the time, according to police estimates, Amit and his associates had carried out over 300 kidney transplants worth nearly Rs.450 million ($12 million).
The following year, in August 1994, the Mumbai Police Crime Branch raided the clinic again following complaints of his involvement in a thriving kidney transplant racket.
The raids at that time came after three poor labourers from Hyderabad complained that Raut and his team had cheated them. He had promised to pay them Rs.60,000 each for a kidney, but short-changed them.
Living in the posh Gulmohar Road area of Juhu, Raut subsequently shifted base to Gurgaon, Haryana, on the outskirts of the national capital, where he was found running an illegal kidney transplant ‘hospital’ in January.