"When I woke up after several hours, I felt a pain in my right
side," Saleem recalled, sitting on a metal cot in a city hospital ward.
"The men said, ‘We have removed your kidney, and you better not breathe
a word about it.’ My life broke into pieces when I heard that."

Saleem was the latest in a long list of poor laborers who had come
to Gurgaon to work and lost their kidneys as a result. Police say they
were victims of a major organ-trafficking racket based in this city for
nearly a decade.

The scam was discovered last week after police, acting on a tip from
a middleman, raided the bungalow where Saleem had been held. They said
they found a labyrinthine kidney bazaar run by a group of men posing as
doctors. Five suspects were arrested.

Since then, police from several Indian provinces have launched a
massive joint investigation into the alleged traffickers, who police
said robbed poor people of their kidneys and sold them to rich patients
around the world.

Several people who were believed to be among the intended recipients
of the organs have been detained, including four Greeks and a couple
from New York who are of Indian origin. They had all come to India on tourist visas and were found staying at a guesthouse near the bungalow.

Investigators said they believe the trafficking network includes buyers from Canada, Greece, Saudi Arabia and Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Given India’s sagging medical infrastructure, cases of kidney
trafficking are not unheard-of here. Hospital facilities for the
storing and transporting of organs remain inadequate, and poor Indians
lured by the prospect of extra money ensure the traffickers a
continuous supply of fresh kidneys. According to a government estimate,
more than 100,000 kidney transplants are needed in India every year,
but only 5,000 are performed legally.

"People think getting a new kidney is like changing the car tire,
after which the car will run full-steam," said Sandeep Guleria, who
heads the kidney transplant unit at the All India Institute of Medical
Sciences in New Delhi. "In much of the country, dialysis facilities are
poorly developed. It is a cheaper alternative [to] recurring expenses
for the family."

Transplant operations are complicated, and recipients need to be
closely matched to donors to reduce the risk of rejection. After
receiving a new organ, patients initially require intensive care and
long-term treatment with powerful anti-rejection drugs.

Some analysts say trafficking is made worse by the absence of
regulation of legal donations. The Indian government is currently
considering launching a full-fledged national organ transplant program
that would simplify the procedures for such donations.

According to police, the racket uncovered last week was run by Amit Kumar,
who was among those who posed as doctors and who had previously been
accused of running a trafficking operation based elsewhere in the
country. He is still at large.

"This was a racket run by a man who has been on the run for about 15
years," said Manjit Singh Ahlawat, Gurgaon’s joint commissioner of
police. "He used to charge about 15 lakh rupees [$37,500] from rich
patients around the world and pay about 50,000 rupees [$1,270] to the
laborer after forcibly removing the kidney. We have seized about 5,000
documents from his office that tell us about the wide network he
operated of buyers, middlemen, diagnostic centers, doctors and
laborers. He has operated under five different names, various
passports, and had 12 bank accounts."

The police have seized Kumar’s computers and are decoding his e-mail
accounts. Five laborers, three of whom had lost kidneys, were also
rescued from the bungalow.

"When I learned my kidney has gone, I thought I was going to die. I
cried nonstop," Saleem said, lifting his shirt to show a white bandage.
"But now I wish I had just died. How can I support my family now and
bring home the bread? I cannot do heavy construction work now — I feel
weak and dizzy all the time."

Next to Saleem’s bed were two other laborers who had lost their kidneys last week: Shakeel Abdullah, 28, and Naseem Ahmad, 25.

According to police, Kumar has run the kidney racket on the same
pattern since the early 1990s. He and his associates were first
detained in Mumbai.

"We first arrested him in 1994," Rakesh Maria, Mumbai’s joint
commissioner of police, said in a telephone interview. "He was
operating under the name Santosh Rameshwar Raut back then. He was
supplying poor people’s kidneys to clients in Yemen, Malaysia, Turkey and Greece."

After being released on bail, Kumar vanished. "Later he moved to
different cities in the north and south," Maria said. "He kept changing
his identity and continued his trade. The police booked him several
times, but he kept escaping."

Maria’s team is now collaborating with the Gurgaon police in the investigation. Authorities have also requested help from Interpol.

Via Washington Post