Telangana kidney racket probe faces many hurdles from MHA

Hyderabad: Investigation officials of Nalgonda police suspect that two medical practitioners, including a doctor from Uttar Pradesh, oversaw the international kidney racket’s India operation. These doctors were directly in touch with their counterparts in Sri Lanka. Arrested accused from Nalgonda, K. Suresh, would work with these doctors and provide donors. However, the police does not have the identities of the doctors as Suresh claimed he knew very little about them. Like the Hyderabad Central Crime Station’s probe into the kidney racket in 2014, the Nalgonda police’s investigation is also likely to hit a roadblock or face inordinate delays as involvement of the central home and external affairs ministries are requi-red to pursue the kingpins of the racket who are based in Sri Lanka.

“During interrogation, Suresh confessed that the doctors are from North India, one of them from Uttar Pradesh. He claimed that all his communication with them were online, so he did not know much about them,” said an investigation official from Nalgonda, adding that Suresh had not met the doctors in person. Police suspect that the two medicos did all the preparations including pre-surgery medical check ups before sending the donors to Colombo. They also handled the financial transactions and travel arrangements for the donors. Suresh seems to be only a small pawn in the racket.

The Nalgonda police will probably find it difficult to find the duo since even the victims, who underwent medical check ups in India before going to Sri Lanka, are not ready to divulge the details. “They say they went willingly to sell their organs because they needed money. They are not ready to give away details of the handlers,” said the official. Mr S. Sudhakar, DSP of Nalgonda, said that it would be difficult to arrest the kingpins of the racket. “If they are in Sri Lanka, how can we arrest them? We are continuing the investigation, let us see what happens in future,” he said.

After 20 months of investigation, the Hyderabad CCS probe could not arrest the kingpins of the racket. All arrests were of local agents, who belonged to the lower strata of the gang. CCS officials said that the city police had a lot of limitations in investigating the case. "When the suspect is based abroad, central government has to decide the course of action. We have serious limitations in the process," said an official.

Engineer loses kidney to racketeers in Colombo:

Muvva Naresh, an engineering graduate in Sattupalli, has alleged that some persons took him to the Sri Lankan capital Colombo and removed a kidney. Naresh’s father Mu-vva Subba Rao of Naidupet, Dammapet mandal, lodged a complaint with the police on Friday. The details were fuzzy and the Dammapet police has sent the complaint and Naresh to the Nalgonda police which is investigating last week’s kidney racket. 

According to the complaint, Naresh, who was then doing a computer course in Hyderabad, was approached by an unidentified person who offered him a job in Colombo, visa and air tickets. Naresh went to Colombo in the last week of November and was put up in a hotel, his father said. “In Colombo, my son became unconscious and regained consciousness after some days,” he said in the complaint. 

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When he woke up, Naresh found some bl-ood marks on his stomach and enquired about his condition. When he wanted to return, he was told that he would be sent to Chennai on December 9 instead of December 4 due to the floods there. Naresh reached Chennai and approached doctors at a private hospital, who informed him that a kidney had been removed. He then called up his father. Naresh later worked in a private hospital in Chennai for a while. 

He reportedly met the person who had made him the Colombo offer and told him of his plight. The person promised to earn money from cricket betting and asked Naresh to arrange for the cast. Mr Subba Rao said that on his request he sent Rs 1 lakh to Naresh, who allegedly lost the money in cricket betting. Later, Naresh turned up in Vijayawada and his father brought him to Naidupet, the complaint said.

Sri Lankan doctor role suspected in kidney racket:

Dr Monik Trevin Sanjeewa, who was named by the Central Crime Station police as the kingpin of the 2014 kidney racket case, studied at the University of Bangalore in 2000 and had registered with both the Indian Medical Council and Sri Lanka Medical Council (SLMC).  The official website of SLMC shows that Dr Monik went back to Sri Lanka in 2003 and started working there.

While in the new kidney racket the Nalgonda police is yet to get any names of Sri Lankan doctors, Dr Monik's role is not ruled out. The two Sri Lankan hospitals named by Hyderabad and Nalgonda police in both cases were used by Dr Monik for transplant surgeries in the 2014 case. “Nawaloka Hospital and Lankan Hospital, both in Colombo, appeared in both the kidney racket cases. These are the main facilities used by racketeers like Monik for surgeries,” said an official.

Despite Sri Lankan police offering help to Hyderabad police earlier, no legal action has been initiated against Dr Monik due to lack of approval from the ministry of External Affairs. Earlier, two Lankan online newspapers, slguardian.org and lankaenews.com, had exposed Dr Monik as one of the chief architects of the ever-growing international kidney racket based in Colombo. 

"Dr Monik has amassed copious revenues by exploiting poor and helpless kidney donors from India," the report stated, adding that his influence in political parties and the medical circle made him powerful. "He is a powerful member of the Government Medical Officers Association (GMOA), and has been acting as a private secretary (unofficially) to Dr Anuruddha Padeniya, the president of the GMOA," the report continued.

The doctor and his associates exploited the Human Tissue Transplant Act, 1987 of Sri Lanka, which deals with organ transplant surgeries. Medical experts from the country had said that the Act had not yet regulated organ donation and Sri Lanka became a hot spot for the transplant surgeries due to lack of regulations. Dr Ananda Samarasekera, chair of the Forensic Department, Malabe Medical Faculty of Sri Lanka, had told a Lankan newspaper, Ceylon Today, last year: "Transplant of Human Tissue Act has no teeth as there are no guiding regulations under it. There are only circulars distributed by the Health ministry among relevant hospitals involved in the process."

Newspapers in Sri Lanka had also revealed that most Indian donors' kidneys were sold by the racketeers to rich patients from USA, Europe and Gulf countries. "They come to Sri Lanka on tourist visas and get their surgery done secretly," the newspaper reports had said.