Influential people, including politicians and businessmen, are on the radar in connection with an international kidney racket, officials said on June 9, days after a doctor was detained in Delhi.



Dr Dipak Shukla, CEO of a private hospital in Delhi, was detained in the national capital on June 7 by a Special Investigation Team and brought to Kanpur for questioning. "Influential people like politicians and businessmen are on police radar. We are looking into the involvement of doctors, hospital authorities and prominent people to find their roles in the illegal kidney and liver transplantation," Superintendent of Police (Crime), Kanpur, Rajesh Yadav said on June 9.

Police are also probing the possible involvement of those who find poor people, forge documents for them and take them to hospitals posing as relatives, he added. The middlemen who scout villages and small towns for potential donors and sometimes lure them with false promises of employment in the city are also under police surveillance, the SP said. "Police probe confirmed that mostly the people who gave a kidney were poor and illiterate, and they got only a fraction of the money with the middleman pocketing the rest," Yadav added.

Meanwhile, Shukla tried to defend himself before police, claiming that he was a doctor and lacked the ability to detect forged documents. "I am cooperating with police and ready to provide all the details," Shukla told reporters. Eight people, including the racket's alleged kingpin, Gaurav Mishra, have been arrested in the case till now.

The international kidney racket was busted on February 17. People involved in it used to remove kidneys of poor people illegally and send them for transplant into patients, including foreigners. Police have arrested Gaurav Mishra of Lakhimpur Khiri, T Rajkumar Rao of Kolkata, Shailesh Saxena of Badarpur in New Delhi, Saboor Ahmad of Kakori in Lucknow, Vicky Singh of Panki in Kanpur and Shamshad Ali of Chowk in Lucknow, Shyam Tiwari and Ramu Pandey in the case. Going by the investigations, almost all the donors have accused Gaurav Mishra of trapping them.