HYDERABAD: A hospital that has rooms for patients on the fourth floor, through the windows of which a temple on a hillock can be seen.

This is too vague a clue but that is all the South Zone police have to crack the mystery behind the sensational kidney theft case.

The victim B. Venkatesh, who alleged that doctors removed one of his kidneys during a surgery for an ulcer, told detectives that he saw a temple on a hill from his hospital room.

However, he was unable to give any other lead. Ventakesh told the police that agents had taken him to the Ravindra Bharathi rotary in a car, from where they reached the hospital in a few minutes.

Little evidence

From this version, investigators inferred the hospital could be somewhere in the central part of the city. "There is no other option but to check each and every hospital," he said.

Initially, police zeroed in on a corporate hospital near the Secretariat. To their surprise, it matched with the description of the viewpoint given by Venkatesh. But that was it, there was no other evidence.

Police took the complainant around the hospital and showed the doctors - urologists and nephrologists - and other staff, but he could not recognise any of them. Interestingly, this hospital's records show two kidney transplant surgeries were conducted during the period when Venkatesh was operated upon. In one case, a Guntur woman donated her kidney to her son and in the second, a man from Krishna district gave his kidney to his brother.

`Cumbersome process'

The police are now trying to locate these two patients to find whether the kidney donations in their cases were genuine or not. "It is a cumbersome process and could take at least a week to ascertain facts in the case of this one hospital," an investigating officer said.

And if it turns out that this hospital is not the culprit, the hunt will have to start from scratch once again.

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