Kidney Thefts Shock India
(But does it really? cm )
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By AMELIA GENTLEMAN
Published: January 30, 2008
GURGAON, India - As the anesthetic wore off, Naseem Mohammed
recalled, he felt an acute pain in his lower left abdomen. Fighting
drowsiness, he fumbled beneath the unfamiliar folds of a green
medical gown and traced his fingers over a bandage attached with
surgical tape. An armed guard by the door told him that his kidney
had been removed.
Mr. Mohammed was the last of about 500 Indians whose kidneys were
removed by a team of doctors running an illegal transplant operation,
supplying kidneys to rich Indians and foreigners, police officials
say. A few hours after his surgery last Thursday, the police raided
the clinic and moved him to a government hospital.
Many of the donors were day laborers, like Mr. Mohammed, picked up
from the streets with the offer of work, driven to a well-equipped
private clinic, and duped or forced at gunpoint to undergo surgery.
Others were bicycle rickshaw drivers and impoverished farmers who
were persuaded to sell their organs, which is illegal in India.
Although several kidney rings have been exposed in India in recent
years, the police believe the scale of this one was unprecedented.
Four doctors, 5 nurses, 20 paramedics, 3 private hospitals, 10
pathology clinics and 5 diagnostic centers were involved, said the
police officer in charge of the investigation, Mohinder Lal.
We suspect around 400 or 500 kidney transplants were done by these
doctors over the last nine years, said Mr. Lal, who is the Gurgaon
police commissioner.
The case has enthralled India's newspaper-reading public. Editorial
writers have been particularly incensed by the failure of the police
to capture the main doctor, who has many names but was known most
recently as Amit Kumar.
He was arrested in 1994 for running a kidney-transplant racket in
Mumbai, but jumped bail, changed his name and set up work again from
a series of clinics hidden inside residential apartments in the
prosperous city of Gurgaon, just outside Delhi.
One of his clinics was raided by the police in 2000, but somehow he
was allowed to continue working. Officials neglected to investigate
further even when at least one television investigation exposed his
work.
The Times of India on Tuesday called on the government to investigate
the nexus between the organ traders and the police.
Investigators were alerted to the existence of the ring on Thursday
by a donor who said the operation had ruined his health.
Apparently tipped off before the raid took place, Dr. Kumar escaped
arrest. Only one of the four main doctors implicated has been
detained.
The officials suspect that several private hospitals in Delhi and its
suburbs were quietly complicit in Dr. Kumar's work and treated
patients recovering from kidney transplants.
Due to its scale, we believe more members of the Delhi medical
fraternity must have been aware of what was going on, Mr. Lal told
reporters on Monday.
He said a team of criminals he called kidney scouts usually roamed
the labor markets Delhi and cities in Uttar Pradesh, India's poorest
state, searching for potential donors. Some prospects were asked
outright if they wanted to sell a kidney and were offered $1,000 to
$2,500.
A car equipped with testing equipment was often on hand so that
potential donors could be checked immediately to see whether their
kidneys matched the needs of prospective patients.
Letters and e-mails from 48 foreigners inquiring about transplants
were discovered in Dr. Kumar's office, Mr. Lal said. Five foreigners
- three from Greece and two Indian-born American citizens - were
found in one of the clinics during the raids. The police suspected
that they may have been about to receive kidney transplants, Mr. Lal
said, but they were later allowed to return home because there was
insufficient evidence to detain them.
Mr. Mohammed, 25, said in an interview on Monday that he had no idea
that it was possible to sell a kidney. He had been picking up odd
jobs in Delhi for the past two years and sending money to his family
in Gujarat. Two weeks ago, he said, he was approached by a bearded
man as he waited at the early-morning labor market by the Old Delhi
train station. The man offered him an unusually generous deal: one
and a half months' work painting, for a little less than $4 a day,
with free food and lodging.
He said he was driven four or five hours away, to a secluded bungalow
surrounded by trees, where he was placed in a room with four other
young men, under the watch of two armed guards.
When I asked why I had been locked inside, the guards slapped me and
said they would shoot me if I asked any more questions, Mr. Mohammed
recalled, lying in his hospital bed, wrapped in an orange blanket,
clenching his teeth and shutting his eyes in pain. He said the men
were given food to cook for themselves and
