Hindustan Times (Lucknow)

The fall, rise and fall of kidney racket kingpin Dr Amit

- Neha Pant neha.pant@htlive.com

DEHRADUN: He did everything possible to evade arrest – used aliases, continuall­y changed places of work across states and burnt all incriminat­ing documents – but law finally got the better of Dr Amit Kumar, who allegedly mastermind­ed the kidney racket that was being run in Dehradun -- and years earlier, in Gurugram.

Amit and his brother Jeevan Kumar, also a doctor, were arrested by Dehradun police from Panchkula in Haryana late on Friday night: He was preparing to escape to Nepal. The police confiscate­d six mobile phones and ₹33 lakh from his car. His son, also a doctor, is still absconding.

Kumar was arrested many times, jumped bail and went absconding in several cases over the past two decades, but always began his ‘business’ of illegal kidney extraction­s afresh each time, thanks to his strong network of touts and middlemen who lined up kidney donors and recipients from different parts of the country and even abroad.

Dehradun police, which arrested Amit, said he had been booked in many cases in places like Mumbai, Guntur and Anand apart from those registered by the Central Bureau of Investigat­ion and the enforcemen­t directorat­e.

Shockingly, Amit, who confessed to police to have performed around 50 renal surgeries in Dehradun in the past two months, is an ayurvedic practition­er and not even qualified to perform a kidney extraction/transplant­ation surgery.

Police said he had an arrangemen­t with a private hospital around 30 km from Dehradun, where the post operative care of the patients were taken. The Dehradun racket started in July.

 ?? VINAY SANTOSH/HT ?? SSP Nivedita Kukreti Kumar with Dr Amit Kumar (wearing spectacles) in Dehradun on Saturday.
VINAY SANTOSH/HT SSP Nivedita Kukreti Kumar with Dr Amit Kumar (wearing spectacles) in Dehradun on Saturday.

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