International organ racket: TN Police directs SPs to get details of missing persons in each district

Chennai: After the arrest of a Kerala-based man in an international organ racket with an Iran connection, Tamil Nadu Police on Thursday directed the Superintendents of Police (SPs) to probe all missing persons complaints in their districts.

It may be recalled that on May 19, Sabith Nasar was arrested at the Kochi International Airport while returning from Iran.

He was arrested by the Kerala Police following a tip-off from the Central Intelligence agencies that he was regularly visiting Iran and other West Asian countries and was suspected to be involved in the organ trade.

Upon interrogation, Sabith Nasar told police that he had taken 20 people from Kerala and other states to Iran for kidney transplants.

He had made people believe that donating organs was legal and took them to Iran for the purpose.

While Sabith Nasar told interrogators that he was only a middleman, police found that he was the main conduit of the racket and his bank transactions gave clear evidence of this.

The arrested person revealed that his victims were mainly from Kerala, Karnataka and some North Indian states.

However Tamil Nadu Police is not leaving any stone unturned and the state police headquarters have sent directives to all the SPs to collect data from their respective police stations on missing person complaints and probe each case in detail with the support of central agencies.

The movement of people from the four international airports of Tamil Nadu – Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai and Tiruchi in the last five years from May 2019 to May 2024 is also under investigation.

Highly-placed sources in Tamil Nadu Police told IANS that Sabith Nasar being a native of Thrissur in Kerala has connections with many people in Coimbatore and surrounding areas and special teams of Tamil Nadu Police have been deployed in these areas to find out if someone from the region was involved in this racket.