PUNE: Police on Thursday arrested Pune's Sassoon General Hospital's former medical superintendent Dr Ajay Taware in connection with an alleged kidney transplant racket at a leading private hospital here, officials said.

Taware is currently lodged at the Yerwada Central Jail here following arrest last year for allegedly tampering with the blood samples of a 17-year-old boy accused of crashing a Porsche car into a motorbike in Pune's Kalyani Nagar and killing two persons.

The city crime branch has now taken him into custody in connection with the 2022 kidney transplant racket at the Ruby Hall Clinic, a leading private hospital here, police said.

"We have taken Dr Ajay Taware into custody in the kidney racket case and he will be produced before the court today," Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime) Nikhil Pingale said.

In 2022, Taware was head of the Regional Authorisation Committee that approved kidney transplants.

The Pune police in May 2022 registered a case against 15 persons, including the managing trustee of the Ruby Hall Clinic and some of its employees, in connection with an alleged malpractice during a kidney transplant procedure in March that year.

A woman from Kolhapur, who was allegedly promised Rs 15 lakh, had fraudulently posed as the wife of a man who needed a transplant and donated her kidney in 2022 to a young woman patient. In turn, the young woman’s mother donated her kidney to the man.

Such a swap involving two patients and their relatives is carried out when the patients cannot receive a kidney from their own kin because of a blood group mismatch.

On March 29, 2022, four days after undergoing the transplant surgery at the Ruby Hall Clinic, the woman revealed her real identity after she had a dispute over money.