Upender

New Delhi, Feb. 15: India’s premier police force has been accused of selling itself to kidney thieves.

Seven Delhi policemen apparently let off a key suspect in the organ transplant scandal for a bribe of less than Rs 20 lakh and slept on the racket for more than a fortnight.

The policemen, including an assistant sub-inspector, have been booked on the charge of taking Rs 19.85 lakh from Upender, a doctor and close aide of Amit Kumar, the alleged kingpin.

Kumar and Upender have been arrested for tricking poor labourers into sham surgeries and then extracting their kidneys.

Upender was picked up on January 7 after a raid on his clinic in Gurgaon but was released after the reported handover of money. The racket was busted by police squads from Uttar Pradesh and Haryana during another raid on the clinic on January 24, as many as 17 days after Delhi police smelt something wrong.

“Absolutely, yes,” Delhi additional commissioner of police (crime branch) Satyendra Garg conceded today, asked whether his force could have exposed the syndicate had the seven policemen not accepted the bribe.

“But still, we have busted an extortion racket,” Garg said, looking for consolation.

The crime branch of Delhi police detained the assistant sub-inspector, Ravinder Kumar Singh, yesterday for taking money from the gang.

Apart from Singh, all the other accused are constables and are absconding. The police said they have found Rs 55,000 allegedly given to Singh but not the rest of the bribe.

The seven-member team, including two head constables and four constables, brought Upender to Connaught Place in Delhi where they contacted Kumar and demanded money, Garg said. The money was handed over after the nod from Kumar.

The six other suspects have been identified as head constables Devender Singh and Vijay Bahadur and constables Naresh Kumar, Kaleem Beg, Surender Rathi and Rakesh Kumar. All the policemen have been placed under suspension and cases under the charges of extortion, wrongful confinement and criminal conspiracy have been slapped against them.

Head constable Devender apparently knew about the racket as he was posted at Nizamuddin police station when Kumar was arrested in a kidney racket case in 2000 by Delhi police, Garg said.

“Devender got some information about the recent activities of Kumar and he used this to extort some money,” Garg said.

“We have to find out more about how these people planned to share the money. Once we arrest the rest of the team, we will be able to get a better picture,” he added.

Delhi police are now grappling with questions such as how deep the rot is and how much the seven policemen knew about the kidney racket.

“They probably had some suspicion, but didn’t know how far the scam had spread,” Garg said.

In Jammu, a CBI team searched the house of Poonam, the second wife of Kumar, and questioned his in-laws on the whereabouts of his other family members.