KARACHI, July 10: Police are looking for the anaesthetist, doctors and paramedics who assisted in the Dr Kashif Mateen, a surgeon accused of stealing a kidney from a patient at a private hospital in North Nazimabad on May 7.
On Monday, Police took remand of Dr Kashif from a court till July 12 and started proper investigation into the matter on the complaint of the patient, Mohammad Kashif.
Investigators said they were trying to establish through clinical tests that whether the kidney recovered from a pathological facility belonged to the same patient or not.
Mr Kashif has lodged an FIR stating that Dr Mateen had removed one of his healthy kidneys while operating upon him for the removal of his gall bladder.
Police found that a complete gall bladder was also deposited in the pathological facility. A medical officer at the facility said that as per their record, the gall bladder belonged to Mohammad Kashif and was sent there for post-operation testing. However, the post-operation radiological investigations established that Mr Kashif still possessed the gall bladder with stones.
Investigators are now trying to locate the patient to whom the deposited gall bladder belongs.
The investigators are also trying to verify the credentials of Dr Mateen from the institutions concerned.
Mr Zubair Mehmood, acting DIG Investigation Zone-II, said: “We have to prove in court that the kidney belongs to Kashif for which we are going through the process of medical tests as advised by doctors.” He said that an expert doctor to provide police technical assistance in the process of investigation would hopefully join in the process on Tuesday.
Besides, the investigators have also located nine patients who were operated upon by Dr Kashif Mateen. Most of the patients had gall bladder-related problems. While eight of them made no complaint of a mishap during treatment, one told the investigators that he would have to check whether he had both the kidneys in place. Police were trying to contact all the patients operated by Dr Kashif Mateen.
During investigations, Dr Mateen insisted that he had not removed the kidney deliberately. However, medical experts said that the incision, beneath ribs, showed that it was carried out for removal of gall bladder though the mark of incision should not be as lengthy in size as it was on the patient in such cases.
According to them a kidney cannot be removed unintentionally because of the ‘peritoneum layer’ that exists between gall bladder and kidney and a surgeon cannot see the kidney unless the layer is cut apart. They argued that if the operation was meant to remove gall bladder and kidney was removed by mistake, then why the gall bladder also was not removed.
