5 ‘doctors’ held for practising without valid degrees in city

Officers from Mumbai police’s crime branch conducted raids at five places in south Mumbai and eastern suburbs on Tuesday evening and arrested five people for allegedly

Officers from Mumbai police’s crime branch conducted raids at five places in south Mumbai and eastern suburbs on Tuesday evening and arrested five people for allegedly running dispensaries without valid degrees.

HT Image

The police said that as per their preliminary inquiry, all the accused had worked as compounders with different doctors previously and later started their own clinics without proper medical knowledge.

The accused have been identified as Shabuddin Kallu Shaikh, 43; Shahid Hussain Baig, 62; Kamal Sharafat Hussain, 38; Zafarmiya Shaikh, 55; and Bilal Sarafat Hussain, 32.

Before conducting the raids, the police had sent their informers as patients to verify the information they had received.

Shaikh, a resident of Jogeshwari, is a school drop-out and operates a dispensary at Antop Hill for the past three years.

The second accused, Baig, is a Class 8 drop-out and had worked as compounder for more than three decades. Four years ago, he started his own dispensary at Dongri, the police said. Zafarmiya and Bilal were arrested from their respective dispensaries in Dharavi and Kurla.

“We sent fake patients to all the dispensaries, who confirmed that the five were providing patients with treatment. At the time of the raids, we had medical officers from the civic body to ascertain if their degrees were fake or real,” said deputy commissioner of the police Shahji Umap of crime branch.

The accused had put up advertisements at railway platforms, trains and walls of public toilets, claiming that they could cure sexual disorders and other ailments, added Umap.