Kidney ring preyed on unwilling donors

GURGAON, India — As the anesthetic wore off, Naseem Mohammed said, he felt an acute pain in the lower left side of his 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.

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 said. A few hours after his operation on Jan. 24, the police raided the clinic and moved him to a government hospital.

Many of the donors were day laborers, like 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 operations. 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 said the scale of this one was unprecedented. Four doctors, five nurses, 20 paramedics, three private hospitals, 10 pathology clinics and five diagnostic centers were involved, said Mohinder Lal, the police officer in charge of the investigation.

The case has enthralled India's newspapers. 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 on suspicion of running a kidney-transplant racket in Bombay, but jumped bail, changed his name and set up work again from several clinics hidden in apartments outside Delhi.

The police raided one of his clinics in 2000, but somehow he was allowed to continue working.

On Tuesday, The Times of India called on the government to investigate "the nexus between the organ traders and the police."

Investigators were alerted to the ring on Jan. 24 by a donor.

Apparently tipped off to the raid, 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 Kumar's work and treated patients recovering from kidney transplants.

Lal said a team of criminals he called kidney scouts usually roamed the labor markets in 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 clients' needs.

Letters and e-mail messages from 48 foreigners inquiring about transplants were discovered in Kumar's office, Lal said. Five foreigners — three from Greece and two Indian-born U.S. citizens — were found in one of the clinics during the raids. The police suspected they had been about to receive transplants, Lal said, but they were later allowed to return home because there was insufficient evidence to detain them.

Mohammed, 25, said he had been picking up odd jobs in Delhi for two years and sending money to his family in Gujarat.

Two weeks ago, he was approached by a man as he waited at the labor market by the Old Delhi train station, he said. The man offered him an unusually generous deal: 1 ½ months' work painting, for a little less than $4 a day, with free food and lodging.

Mohammed said he was driven four or five hours, to a secluded bungalow, 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," Mohammed said, lying in a 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 and periodically nurses would take blood samples.

One by one, he said, they were taken away for operations.

There were no postoperative medical checks and no discussion of money or other compensation, he said.