A Mumbai court on Wednesday remanded the key accused in a kidney racket in police custody till June 18.
The accused, Mukhtar Ansari, was arrested on Tuesday night.
Ansari and two of his accomplices Juber and Javed, both under arrest, used to lure poor people from Mumbai's slums and roads to donate their kidneys in return for money, police officials said.
On May 5, acting on a complaint filed by an Andhra Pradesh-based victim Mudanu Shrinivasan, who alleged that he was promised money for donating a kidney and never given anything, the police arrested four persons, including two doctor.
Interrogation of those arrested revealed that, in April, Javed and Juber befriended Shrinivasan and promised him Rs 3 lakh for selling his kidney.
They admitted him to a nephrology clinic, owned by a man called Pravin Gujarathi, where some tests were conducted on Shrinivasan.
After this, he was sent to Delhi, where his left kidney was allegedly removed.
A Mumbai court, on June 9 rejected the bail pleas of Javed and Juber, while two other accused doctors are out on bail.
Ansari's arrest is big breakthrough. Ansari can provide details of the hospitals and doctors in Delhi involved in kidney racket.
In Mumbai, Ansari is the lynchpin of the racket and this is the modus operandi:
Convince poor people to donate kidneys, get their medical test done and arrange for the victim's travel to Delhi, where the operation is done.
The gang members in Mumbai would then dress up the victim in brand new clothes and send them to Delhi by air. At the Delhi airport, their counterparts will identify the victims by their clothes.
Once the victim is identified, they would be given some anesthetics and rendered unconscious.
After the kidney is removed, the victims are sent to Mumbai by train.
The police say Ansari and his group have allegedly ripped at least 27 people in the same manner.
The Ansari gang was working like a well-oiled machine until Shrinivasan came along.
After the regular procedure was repeated with Shrinivasan, they refused to pay him the Rs 3 lakh that was promised.
Shrinivasan then filed a police complaint, following which the racket came into the open.
The police also arrested two doctors, Samir Kapadia and Pravin Gujarathi, from Mumbai.
These doctors are alleged to have performed the renal angiography tests on the victims to determine their kidney condition before they were sent to Delhi for transplantation. But, these two doctors are ot on bail now.
Kapadia allegedly conducted 16 angiographies in one month without the following proper procedure as required under the Human Organ Transplantation Act.
Following his arrest, police say they can identify the doctors and the hospitals where the operations were conducted.
"From Ansari, we would get detail of the hospital, which we know is in Gurgaon, where such operation is carried out," said J Gaikwad, senior police inspector, Mahim.
