Abortion scam: Foetuses discarded in medical waste dustbins, other shocking details emerge in probe

Team Udayavani, Dec 3, 2023, 8:23 AM IST

Bengaluru: Shocking details have come to light in the ongoing police probe into the illegal abortion and female foeticide scam in Karnataka. According to police the accused disposed the foetuses in dustbins.

During interrogation, the accused spilled the beans about the abortion racket. The police have arrested nine people till now, including two doctors and three lab technicians for their involvement in the nefarious activity.

The probe also revealed that sex determination tests were done at a jaggery production unit in Mandya district where the accused had set up a lab and related facilities and abortions were conducted in Matha hospital of Mysuru.

The police said that Manjula — the arrested head nurse — has revealed that the 12-week-old foetuses were thrown into dustbins along with medical waste and in four days, they would decompose.

“She had also claimed that 6-month-old foetuses were also aborted and the bodies were disposed of into the Cauvery River,” the police said on Saturday.

Manjula worked at the Matha Hospital in Mysuru, where the gang carried out abortions. The accused had told the police that she used to carry out 70 abortions every month. She had also confessed that even 6-month-old foetuses were taken out.

“The 6-month-old foetuses used to be alive for five to 10 minutes after being taken out of the womb. Those foetuses wouldn’t make sound. I used to wrap them in a paper and give it to Nisar (the accused). He would throw them into the Cauvery River to ensure that there is no evidence,” she had told the police.

Police said that the accused was carrying out abortions for six months. She had maintained that since they didn’t have advanced scanning machines, they were sometimes able to determine the gender of the foetus when it was six-month-old.

Police said that the whenever there was delay in identifying the gender, caesarean was conducted to take out the female foetus.

Karnataka government had handed over the investigation of the female foeticide scam to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).

The investigation into the foeticide scam that recently came to light in Bengaluru has led to shocking revelations that the accused had aborted 3,000 female foetuses so far.

Bengaluru Police Commissioner B Dayanand had said that the investigations have shown that the accused had carried out 3,000 abortions so far and in the last three months, 242 female foetuses were killed.

The accused had set a target of 1,000 abortions per year to make money as they charged anywhere between Rs 20,000 to Rs 25,000 per termination of pregnancy.

The scam came to light when Byappanahalli Police, on October 15, tried to stop a vehicle moving suspiciously. The vehicle’s driver did not stop and had to be chased by the police before being caught.

(With IANS inputs)