Kidney kingpin Tipurana Rajkumar Rao hosted feast before his arrest

A close aide of the alleged kingpin of the Delhi kidney racket, Tipurana Rajkumar Rao, was arrested on Wednesday by the West Bengal police at Baguiati, on the outskirts on Kolkata. Rao’s close aide Dipak Kar, a resident of Jangra in Baguiati, had gone into hiding after the racket was exposed by the Delhi police last week. It is also being speculated that Kar was arrested after he had surrendered to the police.

Before his arrest, Kar acknowledged his involvement in the kidney racket and said that he too had donated his kidney in Coimbatore. “My job was to lure donors. I used to get around Rs 5,000 for this. But I fled as my financial condition became weak,” added Kar, who will be produced in court on Thursday.

One more accused, Bhanu Pratap, was arrested from Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday, taking the total number of arrests in the case to 11 till now. He was identified as one of the donors associated with the racket.

Rao, the kingpin of the racket, was arrested from his palatial house at Shibtala in Rajarhat, on the outskirts of Kolkata in the North 24 Parganas, as he was celebrating his wedding anniversary in his new residence on Tuesday evening. Rao had recently purchased Seven Hills house for around Rs 30 lakh and spent a large amount of money in decorating the two-storey building.

Originally from Hyderabad, Rao had moved to Kolkata in 2013 with his wife and son and started staying in Rajarhat house. Recently, he had shifted to his new address, Seven Hills, a few hundred metres away from his previous home.

A joint team of the Delhi police and Bidhannagar Commissionerate had raided a house in Howrah in search of Rao but did not find him there. “He hosted a feast on occasion of Griha Pravesh (house warming ceremony) on Monday and he had invited neighbours and other locals. On Tuesday, he threw another party in his new home to celebrate his wedding anniversary. He usually kept to himself and never gave any trouble to anyone,” said a middle-aged female neighbour of the Rao family, on condition of anonymity. Rao had invited nearly 250 neighbours for his wedding anniversary party, sources revealed. However, the raid at Seven Hills soon changed the mood of the event. Rao’s neighbour said no one in the neighbourhood had any clue that he was involved in “such a heinous” crime. Another local resident recalled that Rao hardly interacted with his neighbours, unlike his wife and never spoke about his job. During his interrogation after his arrest, Rao told the police that had he sold his kidney five years ago before starting the racket, in which each kidney was sold for around Rs 25 lakh, but each donor got Rs 5 lakh only. Rao has been booked under Sections 419 (cheating by impersonation), 420 (cheating), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 471 (use of a forged document as genuine) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code. On Wednesday afternoon, Rao was produced before the chief judicial magistrate at the Barasat court in North 24 Parganas.