Summons to six for ‘illegal’ skin bank at dera hospital

Sushil Manav

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Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, October 23

A court in Sirsa on Tuesday issued summons to five functionaries of the Dera Sacha Sauda’s Shah Satnam Multispecialty Hospital and a Karnal-based doctor under the Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act for running a skin bank without registration.

Twenty-nine containers with human skins were recovered from the dera’s hospital during an inspection by a team of the Health Department on September 9 last year, days after the dera chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh had been convicted and sentenced to 20 years in jail for raping two of his followers.

Acting on a complaint filed by Civil Surgeon Dr Gobind Gupta, the court of Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate Vijay James issued summons to Abhijeet Bhagat, chairman, Shah Satnam Development Foundation, a society that runs the hospital, Col OP Kashnia, chief operating officer of the foundation, Dr MP Singh, chief medical officer of the hospital, Dr Swapnil Garg, a plastic surgeon working there and Balbir Singh, an operation theatre technician.

Summons had also been issued to Dr Rakesh Jindal, in charge of Balaji Hospital, Karnal, who purchased a skin graft from the skin bank.

All six accused have been directed to appear before the court on December 14, the next date of hearing.

The team recovered 29 plastic containers containing skin pieces of varying length and width which were found preserved.

As per records of the hospital, 40 units of skin grafts were collected by the dera’s skin bank, but out of these eight grafts were discarded due to various infections to the diseased persons from whose bodies the skin grafts were removed.

Dr Punit of the multispecialty hospital who joined the inspection informed the team that two grafts had been used for treatment of patients in the hospital and one was provided to Balaji Hospital, Karnal, for a patient.

The hospital authorities could not produce any certificate of registration or a licence to run the skin bank, though they produced an application purportedly furnished to Sirsa DC and Civil Surgeon stating that such skin bank was opened in the hospital.

Dr MP Singh is also facing trial in the Special CBI Court in Panchkula in case of castration of several sadhus of the dera.