Tenth accused held in kidney racket

Kanpur: One more accused was arrested on Monday in connection with the international kidney racket busted in the city on February 17, taking the total number of arrests in the case to 10.
The tenth accused, Junaid Ahmed Khan, a resident of Lucknow, was arrested from Andha Quan in Barra area of the city in the morning.

Inspector Barra Atul Kumar Srivastava said, “Junaid is a resident of Lucknow. He had once donated his kidney and was involved in arranging donors and counselling them prior to their kidney transplant and also helped them arrange fake IDs.”

“Junaid has told us that he was into the racket since 2011. His Lucknow-based friend Gaurav Misra, who has been already arrested, had taken him to a hospital in Jalandhar where his kidney was extracted. While Junaid got only Rs 3.50 lakh for his kidney, Gaurav had pocketed Rs 10 lakh. Since then, Junaid got involved into the racket and was once arrested by the Punjab police in 2015,” he added.

“Junaid was arrested in the morning today (Monday) from city’s Andha Quan area in Barra,” the Inspector said. Juniad had initially worked at a Call Centre in Lucknow.

Gaurav and eight others have already been arrested and sent to jail.

The international kidney racket was busted in the city on February 17 with the arrest of Gaurav of Lakhimpur Khiri; T Rajkumar Rao of Kolkata; Shailesh Saxena of Badarpur, New Delhi; Saboor Ahmad of Kakori, Lucknow; Vicky Singh of Panki; Kanpur and Shamshad Ali of Chowk, Lucknow have already been arrested. Later, on March 2 two more persons — Ramu Pandey and Shyam Tiwari were arrested in the city.