Five 'organ smugglers' held in city
Detectives arrested five members of a suspected human organ smuggling gang in the capital on Friday.
Abdul Jalil, 45, the alleged leader of the gang, was arrested at Gabtoli Bus Terminal around noon when he arrived there from Joypurhat with a youth named Abu Hasan, who was lured into becoming a “kidney donor”, said Monirul Islam, joint commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP).
Jalil brought Hasan to Dhaka with the promise of buying him a CNG-run three-wheeler once the transplantation was done, Monirul said while briefing reporters at the DMP media centre in the capital yesterday.
On the basis of his information, detectives arrested four other suspects -- Sheikh Jakir alias Shakir, Ashiqur Rahman alias Jebin, Fazle Rabbi and Zihan Rahman -- from Bangla Academy area near Dhaka University campus the same day.
A teenage boy, Mahbubur Rahman Shanto, was also rescued from there. He was reportedly to become the gang's next victim.
Mahbub was told he would be given Tk 20,000 in exchange for donating blood. But the criminals actually planned to “sell” his kidney to a patient and then kill him, Monirul said.
Senior Assistant Police Commissioner Mahmuda Afroz Lucky, who busted the criminals, said Shakir admitted that the gang was planning to knock out Mahbub with sedatives and then hand him over to an “international ring of organ traffickers”.
“We are interrogating the arrestees to find out whether any private hospitals or clinics in Bangladesh were involved,” she added.
Jalil had been tricking poor people into selling their kidneys for about eight years, detectives claimed, adding that he confessed to mediating the buying and selling of four persons' kidneys in recent years. The transplants took place in private hospitals of Kolkata, India, but the patients who bought the kidneys were all Bangladeshis.
As organ trafficking saw a boom among the relatively poor people of northern districts, physicians became “seriously reluctant” to conduct transplants after 2011, when stories of human organ trade in Joypurhat area appeared in the media, former director of Kidney Institute Prof Firoz Khan told The Daily Star.
“It is illegal to conduct kidney transplant in the country unless the donor and patient are first and second relatives. It means outside of parents, siblings, uncles and aunts, nobody can donate kidneys,” he said.
However, the Organ Transplant Act does not define how the relation between the donor and the recipient should be proved, he said.
Due to an absence of an accepted method of verifying the relationships, very few doctors or institutions undertake kidney transplants these days, he explained.
In 2011, stories of brokers luring victims into “selling” their kidneys surfaced in the media. Sometimes, victims were reportedly kidnapped and killed.