Gurgaon kidney scam or Nithari murders, apathy was same
Feb 1, 2008 - 9:35:51 AM
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'Gurgaon police officials even threatened us not to give any statement to the Moradabad police when they swooped down on the bungalow last week.'
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By Sahil Makkar,
[RxPG] Gurgaon, Feb 1 - Blood flowing in the drain outside D-5 and residents of the posh colony just outside the national capital finding the goings on inside the bungalow suspicious but not bothering enough to report. It could be Noida where 19 children from Nithari village were mutilated, but it is not.
It is Gurgaon, where a multimillion rupee international kidney racket was busted last week, unravelling not just how poor labourers were being incited with money to part with their kidneys but also how an indifferent people helped the unscrupulous thrive - and survive.
The similarities are eerie, starting with the address D-5.
In the satellite town of Noida, Moninder Singh Pandher allegedly used his house D-5 with his domestic help Surinder Koli to lure children, who were sexually abused, killed and whose body parts were found in the drain just behind the house.
In Delhi's other satellite town, Gurgaon, another horrific crime was unfolding. Also in a D-5 house - DLF Phase One's D-5/29 guesthouse and a residential-house-cum-hospital in Sector-23, where Amit Kumar alias Santosh Rameshwar Raut, the kingpin of the kidney scam, and his gang were luring the poor and the desperate with money to extract their kidneys from them.
Here too, people were quoted as saying how blood was flowing in the drain and how there was also a strange smell, and sometimes even pieces of flesh. In both cases - two of the biggest exposes in recent times - the apathy of the people led to the rackets flourishing.
Outside the Sector-23 posh three-storey residence-cum-hospital in Gurgaon, people may have noticed the swabs of cotton, blood-stained clothes, bandages and empty medicine packets/pouch thrown in two adjacent vacant plots.
But they never blew the whistle.
'I have been supplying newspaper at the house for the past three years, but ignored the signs. Once I asked the guard, but he feigned ignorance,' said newspaper vendor Swapan Jana.
Wing Commander M.M. Marwah, a Sector 23 resident, said: 'It is shocking news for all Gurgaon residents. Police had once raided and sealed the house a few years ago, but we don't know how they managed to get it reopened.
'We firmly believe that senior police are involved in the scam.'
Asked why the Residents Welfare Association didn't take any initiative despite suspicion that something was amiss, Marwah said: 'We never had any interaction with the owner and at that time the RWA was also not fully operative.'
The lethargy in reporting the matter resulted in hundreds of people losing a kidney and a massive scam that thrived for at least three years.
The story was not too different in DLF, where the clients stayed in a guesthouse and where also neighbours knew something was wrong but remained mum.
'I have seen many foreigners - mostly above 40 - staying in the guesthouse. But they never interacted with anyone. The big iron gate of this three-storey mansion was only opened for a few select people and the three servants kept to themselves,' Satbir Kumar, a driver in the nearby house, told IANS.
'Before the police raids, we had always thought an international sex racket was flourishing in the house,' Kumar said.
Like Nithari, where the accused enjoyed police protection and continued their macabre killings, the kidney scamsters always maintained a healthy relationship with police.
'Saab, we used to often see a gun-toting police official moving in and out of the guesthouse with a healthy man, who is now identified as doctor Amit Kumar. We were scared of reporting what we thought was a sex racket due to the movements of police officials there,' a guard, sitting next to the D-5/29 residence, said on condition of anonymity.
'Gurgaon police officials even threatened us not to give any statement to the Moradabad police when they swooped down on the bungalow last week.'
The threats and the plain indifference colluded towards a colossal exploitative racket, which threatened lives in Gurgaon. And took them in Noida.
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