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INDIAN POLICE SAY they have arrested the suspected leader of an illegal organ donation racket run out of one of the country’s top hospitals.
T Rajkumar Rao was arrested in the eastern city of Kolkata late yesterday on suspicion of leading a criminal gang that lured poor people to sell their kidneys, which were sold on for huge profits.
The commercial trade of organs is illegal in India and the gang forged documents to pretend the donors were relatives of transplant patients in order to undergo the operations at the Apollo hospital.
“He (Rao) was arrested from Kolkata,” police investigator Nidhin Walson told AFP in New Delhi.
An officer in Kolkata said Rao was wanted in a number of such cases across several South Asian countries.
Police also arrested three donors including a couple who sold their kidneys for a combined 700,000 rupees (€10,000) to pay off a loan they took out to cover the cost of their son’s medical treatment.
Five staff at the Apollo hospital have also been arrested.
Apollo has denied any role in the scam, saying it has been a “victim of a well-orchestrated operation to cheat patients and the hospital”.
It said it had set up an independent inquiry committee to advise on safeguards.
Millions of Indians suffer from kidney disease, mostly because of high rates of diabetes.
But a chronic shortage of organs available for transplant has fuelled a black market.
The Organ Receiving and Giving Awareness Network (ORGAN), a pressure group, says more needs to be done to boost donation in India where just 3,000 organs are donated annually against a demand for more than 500,000.
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Good to see this sort of stuff!
In fairness NASA are great at this sort of thing. Their astronauts give loads of their time in ISS to education.
… at this sort of thing too.
@Paraic McDonagh: Nasa ARE great at this. They’ve been faking it since the beginning. So good at it now that it nearly appears real. Pity they can’t push past the 600 mile mile Van Allen belt limitation though. Spoils the whole show.
Fantastic opportunity for these young kids. I am very jealous!
Brilliant for these schools.
Apparently we’re all on a big ball, rotating at a speed of 1000mph and further rotating around a Sun, at 67,000mph. In addition, all of that is hurtling through an infinite universe at speeds up in the 100s of 1000s of mph – yet I feel absolutely zero vibration, lateral movement, or rotational pull from it all.
Do you?
@Patrick Mac: And isn’t it interesting that when the Navy projects their 2″ missile beam across over the surface of the seas boasting up to 60 mile of accurate range, they never see any radius or curvature on the sea plain, impeding their view across the 60 mile span. The rise in the middle across 60 miles should be .45 of a mile. I think one would notice that.
have your say