Mumbai, Jan. 29: A local court today let out nephrologist Suresh P. Trivedi on bail but did not spare police for “not knowing the rulebook”.

Trivedi, a senior nephrologist at Bombay Hospital arrested last week in a kidney transplantation racket, was supposed to be prosecuted under the stringent Human Organ Transplantation Act, 1994. The police charged him with forgery and cheating.

Additional chief metropolitan magistrate A.. Choure said that was not it. “What have you done in the last seven days that you were investigating the racket and interrogating Trivedi?’’ he asked.

As the police fumbled, he took out a law book and handed it to them. “Read this,” the judge told the red-faced prosecution team. “It is all in here.”

Choure granted bail to Trivedi on a surety of Rs 50,000 and asked him to deposit his passport with the police.

It had been ascertained that the physician, who has been with the hospital for 25 years, had conducted around 60 transplants, each for about Rs 2 lakh to Rs 3 lakh.

He would, along with some others, allegedly zero in on rich patients in need of transplants and sell them at astronomical sums the kidneys cheaply procured from poor men.