Do no harm

The case of Dr Fawad Mumtaz -- a surgeon guilty of performing illegal kidney transplants -- seems straight out of a thriller movie centred on a protagonist with a God complex. As we delve deeper, Mumtaz’s story gets even more horrifying. The latest media reports suggest that the surgeon was rearrested by the Lahore police a couple of days after he managed to escape from custody. He has been arrested several times before too and has managed to secure bail and go back to running his unlawful transplant operations. News reports say that Mumtaz used to work as a plastic surgeon at a state-owned hospital in Lahore, and has been running the organ transplant racket since 2009 in different parts of the country, including Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Mumtaz’s victims are not limited to local Pakistanis; he has trapped quite a few foreign clients, profiting off of their vulnerabilities.

Mumtaz followed a carefully designed plan to perform surgeries, covering his tracks by renting out houses for such operations. He also chose AJK for most of his scheduled surgeries; the lack of laws against these illegal practices in AJK provided a safe space to him, making money on the side away from the long arms of the law. His partners-in-crime (doctors) would draft fake death certificates to deflect any blame away from him. His criminal surgeries have been quite profitable though, apparently helping him achieve billionaire status. Mumtaz was aided in large part by the fact that Pakistan does not have thriving organ transplant programmes. In most cases, only blood relatives of a patient are accepted as donors. Although the relatives-only policy was introduced to save the vulnerable from exploitation and ensure that their financial insecurity does not put their health in danger, procedures performed under the table do not have to follow any guidelines/rules. Also, there is no mechanism as such through which people can donate their healthy organs after death. This opens up space for characters like Fawad Mumtaz.

Local donors are usually the poor and the underprivileged. The recipients are mostly privileged people who want to have another chance at a healthy life. For profiteers like Mumtaz, this creates a perfect opportunity to increase their assets. Given how most people know the risk such procedures carry, there are no legal actions in case of mishaps. The government has to take an aggressive stance. The first step could be to actually implement the Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act, 2010. The second could be to make sure such medical professionals have their licences revoked. But at the end of the day, what is most needed is to ensure that the root causes of just why illegal organ trade takes place are resolved. Nothing else will work.