KARACHI, July 8: The doctor who has been accused of stealing a kidney from a patient during surgery at a private hospital on May 7 was arrested on Saturday morning from a place where he was hiding.

Police investigators are yet to determine whether the doctor was associated with some organised organ trade cartel or he removed the kidney, instead of gall bladder, by mistake or with some motive.

Police said on Saturday that Dr Kashif Mateen was accused of removing a healthy kidney without the consent of the patient during a surgical operation on May 7. Dr Kashif operated upon the patient, Mohammad Kashif, at the Medi Complex Hospital in North Nazimabad for removal of his gall bladder which contained stones.

“We have arrested him (Dr Kashif) from the house of his girlfriend where he had taken shelter to escape arrest. Senior investigating officers interrogated him the whole night and in the morning,” said an investigating officer.

Dr Mateen told the investigators that he got his higher education in the field of medicine and surgery from Ireland and he had already undertaken more than 1,000 surgical operations.

Dr Kashif, who is married and has one child, is a resident of Block-10, Federal B Area, as he informed the investigators.

He maintained that he had removed the patient’s kidney inadvertently. “It was just a mistake.” he insisted, while admitting that the patient’s file did show that he was to be operated upon for the removal of gall bladder and not the kidney.

While the investigators declined to divulge anything about the removed kidney, sources in the police department revealed that the investigators had extracted some information from Dr Mateen about it. They claimed that the investigators had been told that it was kept at a pathological facility. But they were not sure that the organ was alive and valid to be transplanted.

SSP Investigation Mir Zubair Mehmood, who also holds the charge of DIG Investigation Zone-II, said the police suspected that Dr Mateen, in connivance with some other doctors or paramedics, was trying to cover up his wrongdoings. Police were also looking into the veracity of the reports received from certain quarters about similar cases in the history of the same hospital.

He said that the police had sought assistance of an expert doctor for guidance on the technical aspect of the case during the investigation process.