A 30-year-old man from Kerala working as an assistant at a hospital in Tehran was arrested on charges of human trafficking, soon after his arrival at Kochi International Airport. He was immediately taken into judicial custody.
The Intelligence Bureau and immigration officials worked in tandem to secure Sabith Nasar, who was on a visit to Kerala to meet his family. Investigations over a period of time revealed Nasar’s involvement in human trafficking and “commercial dealings with human organs” since 2019, when he took up a job in the department of organ transplantation in Tehran. From that time, his visits to India would mean luring the poor to donate their organs for a meagre sum. He arranged for their flight tickets so they could land in Iran where their organs were surgically removed in the name of ‘donation’ or ‘harvesting’. The victims lost their kidneys for Rs.5 lakh even as middlemen like Nasar scooted with large sums of money. The poor people were also made to believe that donating their organs for money, in the manner they were convinced to do, was not legally wrong.
Whether Nasar, a civil engineering diploma holder, is the key person in the criminal operations is still being explored though the investigations wing has enough proof to ascertain his role in the racket for several years. Nasar left Kerala in 2019 to take up the job at the Tehran hospital. He has been actively operating since then with the mafia.
Nasar’s arrest throws light on a flawed political and medical system, and how it can cost people their dignity and life. – editor@nrifocus.com
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