Kidney racket: 3 more arrested

Two women were among three more persons arrested today in connection with the kidney racket busted in Apollo Hospital here last week, taking the total numbers of arrests in the high-profile case to eight.
The names of the three persons, yet to be disclosed by police, had emerged during the interrogation of the five arrested earlier, a senior official said.
The official further said, all three of them are donors associated with the racket. While two of them were apprehended from Kanpur, the other was arrested from Siliguri.
Meanwhile, another police team has been sent to Kanpur to conduct more raids to nab some other suspects identified in connection with the racket, which was active in several states across the nation.

The kingpin of the racket, Rajukumar Rao, who is suspected to have links with similar rackets with Nepal, Sri Lanka and Indonesia, is still at large.
Meanwhile, the investigators yesterday came across the name of another senior nephrologist in connection with the racket. It is suspected that a few kidney transplants, which were facilitated by the racketeers, were done by the doctor concerned in Apollo Hospital.

However, so far there is no evidence to prove his intent but the roles of his personal secretaries are under scanner, an official privy to the investigation had said.
During investigation, it has also emerged that some of the recipients who procured kidney from the racket had used forged documents to hide their addresses.

The police has short-listed the names of three senior doctors from the hospital's in-house assessment committee for verifying documents related to transplants. The three of them are likely to be questioned first as they had cleared the papers in connection with the surgeries under police scanner.
Suspecting the involvement of some senior staffers and even doctors in the racket, Delhi Police has served notices under CrPC sections 90 and 160 to the higher authorities of Apollo Hospital asking them to join probe and provide documents pertaining to kidney transplants carried out in the hospital in the past few months.
They will be scrutinised by a 25-member special team set up to crack the entire nexus, the senior official said.

Two more prominent private hospitals in the city have come under the police scanner.