E-Paper
3 NRI docs in S Africa kidney racket
One of them has won numerous awards for humanitarian activities.
Three South African Indians are among five leading doctors facing charges of alleged involvement in a scam that saw Brazilians being paid paltry sums for their kidneys, which were transplanted into mainly Israeli clients.
One of the three, Ariff Haffajee, is the deputy head of surgery at the Nelson Mandela Medical School and has won numerous international awards for humanitarian activities. His boss John Robbs has also been charged, along with doctors Mahadev Naidoo, Neil Christopher and Kapil Satyapal.
The medical men were allegedly part of a team that performed more than 110 transplants at the St Augustine Hospital, which prosecutors say were illegal.
Four others, a kidney specialist, two transplant unit staffers and a Hebrew interpreter, were arrested earlier to face charges of fraud, assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm and contraventions of South Africa's Human Tissue Act.
The charges were framed after local police uncovered a syndicate that recruited donors from Brazil who were paid a few hundred dollars for their organs.
Israeli recipients of the kidneys then paid more than $100,000 each for the operations, flying in especially to get a transplant.
The Human Tissue Act disallows payment for organ donation, while the fraud charges relate to the doctors who certified that the donors were blood relatives of the recipients and that no money had changed hands.
All the doctors arrested paid bail of about $8,000 each, except for Haffajee, who paid about $800.
Representatives for the doctors have said they assisted in the operations to alleviate the plight of patients without knowing that the organs had been obtained through illegal means.
Lawyers acting for Haffajee argued that he had "put in the kidneys" without seeing the affidavits, and the only question to be answered in his case was whether he had known or not whether the affidavits were true.
Advocate JP van der Veen denied that Haffajee was involved in "some big international conspiracy", describing him as an academic who had devoted his entire life to education and medicine rather than being "a Ferrari-driving, high-flying, golf-playing doctor".
The case has been adjourned to September 16.
