Illegal kidney racket with Delhi links busted, key accused on the run

New Delhi: The ghost of another illegal kidney racket is once again haunting the capital, with a police crackdown on a Kanpur-based syndicate revealing links to Delhi. The trail surfaced after Uttar Pradesh police conducted a raid in west Delhi’s Uttam Nagar to apprehend an operation theatre (OT) manager allegedly central to the network.

The suspect, Mudassar Ali Siddiqui, is accused of allegedly removing a kidney from an MBA student and facilitating a transplant on a woman. He is currently on the run. According to police, he allegedly used his insider access to facilitate the syndicate’s operations across NCR hospitals and also acted as the bridge between the illegal donors and the gang.

Lookout circulars have been issued against four doctors suspected to be on the run. So far, eight people have been arrested by UP Police, including two OT technicians, Kuldeep and Rajesh, from Ghaziabad.

The latest case follows a familiar pattern and echoes earlier high-profile organ trafficking busts in and around Delhi. In Jan this year, police dismantled a major racket involving a prominent Delhi-based doctor.

Several similar cases uncovered by Delhi Police over the years point to the persistence of well-organised networks exploiting gaps in the city’s medical oversight.

The first major racket was exposed in the mid-2000s when Dr Amit Kumar, alias Doctor Death, was arrested for orchestrating a multibillion-rupee organ scandal across Gurgaon and Delhi. By 2016, the same medical landscape was haunted by a “kidney factory” operation in which hospital staff forged documents to disguise unrelated donors as relatives of the recipients.

By 2019, the scale of the trade had grown further, with investigators unearthing a Rs 100-crore network involving a hospital CEO, corrupt police personnel and administrative officials. In that operation, impoverished individuals who sold their organs to clear debts were often recruited as agents for the syndicate.

More recently, in July 2024, an international racket was busted after a female surgeon was arrested for conducting illegal transplants in Noida for patients brought in from Bangladesh.

Across these cases, investigators say the modus operandi remains strikingly similar. Syndicates target the loan-trapped poor using counterfeit Aadhaar cards, forged certificates from village authorities and fake no objection certificates (NOCs). Fabricated family trees are routinely submitted to meet legal requirements for live organ donations.

“In the last few busts, it has come to the fore that the gang members first took jobs in reputed hospitals as transplant coordinators and then gained training in the kidney transplant processes employed by those hospitals. Thereafter, they identified patients suffering from kidney disease who were undergoing treatment at various hospitals in Delhi, Faridabad, Mohali, Panchkula, Agra, Indore and Gujarat,” said a senior officer.

They contacted potential donors through social media, exploiting their impoverished circumstances by promising Rs 5 lakh to Rs 6 lakh for their kidneys. “Forged documents were created to falsely portray patients and donors as close relatives, a mandatory requirement. Based on forged documents, they underwent their preliminary medical examination and arrangements were made to pass the scrutiny of the transplant authorisation committee in different hospitals,” said another investigator.

But each bust reveals a more resilient network that adapts its methods, moving from large, well-known hospitals to smaller, less-regulated nursing homes to avoid detection.