Britons Held in India Kidney Snatching Investigation

Indian police have confiscated the passports of two Britons who allegedly traveled to the country to buy kidneys in an organ transplant racket, investigators said today.

After raiding a private hospital last week in Gurgaon, an upmarket suburb of Delhi, police found that poor laborers had had their kidneys removed, sometimes against their will, and sold to clients from around the world.

Doctors running the illegal operation charged 1.5m rupees (£18,750) for a kidney transplant while the donor was paid about 40,000 rupees.

The trade has shocked India, which banned the sale of kidneys for commercial gain in 1994 with jail terms of up to five years for those found guilty. However, the ring is believed to have seen more than 500 organs bought in the past nine years.

The police seized computers and are decoding e-mail accounts. Five laborers, three of whom had lost kidneys, were also rescued. A number of foreign nationals, caught waiting for transplants, have been questioned. Police told the Guardian today that "two British people have not been let out of the country" as part of their investigation".

We are holding their passports. They are helping with our investigation... [There] are allegations that they are part [of the buying ring]," said the deputy commissioner of Gurgaon police, Rakesh Arya. "We are cross checking certain things. They have been apprehended but not yet charged."

The police refused to divulge their names and the British High Commission said it had not been informed of an investigation.

The masterminds behind the illegal trade, say officers, were two Indian brothers, neither of whom had any medical training but apparently supervised surgery.

One of the brothers has been arrested in Mumbai but the alleged kingpin, named as Amit Kumar, is believed to be on the run in Canada. Television channels reported that a nurse, a foreign national called Linda, had confessed to police about breaking the law.

The investigation has now spread to seven Indian states, with doctors accused of operating across northern Indian.

India's government has been spurred into action over the affair. The country's top investigating agency has been drafted in to lead a probe while the health minister, Anbumani Ramadoss, said he would make the existing organ trade legislation "more stringent".

According to a government estimate, more than 100,000 kidney transplants are required in India every year, but only 5,000 are performed legally.

Experts say that the black market for kidneys is booming for two reasons. One is that western patients can pay a poor person a year's salary for an organ. The second is that there is no affordable public health care system in India, and hospital facilities for the storing and transporting of organs remain inadequate.

"This problem comes from the economic disparity between the western hemisphere and the poor here. Western patients can simply buy organs and in this country we have no national health service," said Sandeep Guleria, professor of medicine at Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

"Only 20% in the country can access any kind of medical care. We need a much bigger deterrence in terms of jail sentences."