LAHORE, July 1: The Cantonment police arrested a surgeon, his six assistants and their foreigner patient for an illegal kidney transplant in a private house near the airport on Friday.

Police said Dr Anees and paramedics Nadeem, Imran, Mushtaq, Sagheer, Mubashar and Ali were arrested in an Ameeruddin Colony house near Alfaisal Town while transplanting a kidney into an Indonesian identified as Abdullah. The house owner, Muhammad Khurshid, is at large.

North Cantonment DSP Mian Absar told Dawn the police found an alleged kidney donor lying unconscious at the house under the influence of anesthesia. His one kidney was to be transplanted sometimes later into the Indonesian patient who was also lying on a stretcher in the house.

The donor, yet to be identified, was shifted to Services Hospital by Rescue 1122, the DSP said.

He said initial investigation suggested that the doctor had been doing the illegal business at the place for the last one year or so. He had carried out dozens of kidney operations, mostly on Arab and Middle East clients, while most of kidney sellers were from poor families of the provincial capital and some other districts. The illegal clinic was set up in a house near the Allama Iqbal International Airport which suited the foreigner patients, he said.

He said apparently the donor in the case seemed to be a drug addict who would have sold his kidney for Rs150,000 to Rs200,000. He said the police had expanded its investigation suspecting the involvement of a ring of doctors in the illegal business. He said the ring would conduct pre-operative investigations of both the donor and the patient from private laboratories to keep the business “underground”.

The police officer said they had come to know about the transplantation through a police employee, also a resident of the locality. He said the police had put the house under surveillance for four days on the directions of the DIG (operations).

Police have yet to lodge an FIR as the initial investigations are under way.

In recent years, Pakistan has emerged as one of the largest centres for commerce and tourism in renal transplantation as many rings exploit poor people and buy their kidneys against Rs150,000 to 200,000 and charge a foreigner patient up to Rs1 million. Earlier, one such illegal kidney transplant was reported in Valencia Town in October 2010 wherein an Oman woman had died during the operation.