BANGALORE: The Bangalore police have busted a racket in human skeleton trade by arresting six workers at two burial grounds maintained by the Bangalore Mahanagara Palike.

Commissioner of Police Ajai Kumar Singh told presspersons on Friday that the accused exhumed bodies at the burial grounds and sold skeletons, skulls and bones to "tantriks", medical students and laboratories.

The accused charged Rs. 500 for a skull and about Rs. 200 for bones. Dr. Singh said that following media reports on the trade in skeletal remains, the police sent decoys to burial grounds in Okalipuram and Banashankari and trapped the accused on Thursday.

The names of those arrested were given as Sridhar (20), Manjunath (22) and Ramamurthy (23), workers at the Hindu burial ground on Subramanyapura Main Road in Banashankari police station limits; Ganesh (35), Prakash (25) and Chandru (26), workers at the burial ground at Saibabanagar in Okalipuram in Sriramapuram police station limits. They worked as watchmen and gravediggers, Dr. Singh said.

He said it is illegal to exhume a body unless a court has ordered it. To a question, Dr. Singh said there are reports of trade in unclaimed bodies and he will take up the matter with the Medical Education Department. The police will inquire into the reports that unclaimed bodies are illegally supplied to medical colleges.

It is alleged that several unclaimed bodies from government hospitals in Bangalore are being illegally sent to private medical colleges in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. It is learnt that the demand for cadavers has increased manifold after the establishment of medical colleges in the south Indian States.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail