Sarda brother arrested in Monozyme blood scam

Kolkata, Oct 26 (UNI) Ghyansham Sarda, one of the prime accused in the blood scam in West Bengal, was today arrested by the Detective Department (DD) officers from Kolkata airport.

Gyanwant Singh, Depurty Commissioner, DD told UNI here, ''We have arrested Ghyansham Sarda today from Kolkata airport. He will be produced to the court in the afternoon.'' This is the second significant arrest by the sleuths in the blood scam, after Govind Sarda was taken into custody a few days back.

Ghyansham Sarda is the brother of Govind Sarda.

Govind Sarda's company, Secundrabad based Monozyme India, had alledly used genuine blood-test kits as a decoy to hoodwink the government into handing it the supply contract, police officers said.

Now there are fears that thousands' units of contaminated blood could have been given to recipients as the faulty kits might have failed to detect infections.

''The samples they sent for testing were cleared by the expert committee as there was nothing wrong with them. But kits in the final consignments have passed their expiry dates,'' a police officer said.

Monozyme India is said to have bagged the contract by quoting Rs 20 for a kit against its rivals' Rs 60-70.

Monozyme had won the contract in December 2004 after the West Bengal State AIDS Control and Prevention Society (WBSACPS)floated the tenders.

Since then, the company has supplied lakhs of kits meant for detecting infections 'such as HIV, Hepatitis B or C' for blood, collection.

Till August 2006, it had supplied the government over 1,40,000 kits for testing Hepatitis B and C, health officials said.

The Sarda family had reportedly claimed that they started supplying in Bengal in January 2006. The order was renewed a few months later. They claimed to have supplied around 1,000 kits to WBSACPS, none of which had passed the expiry date.

But investigating officers said they had seized nearly 1,00,000 kits supplied by Monozyme that had passed their expiry dates. ''Some of the kits were supplied way back in 2005,'' an officer said.

The police have revealed that the cartons in which the kits arrived, mentioned 2007 as the expiry date, but the boxes inside simply stated ''005''. The use-by date on the test pouches inside the boxes were either missing or smudged.

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