Amidst World Punjabi Conference festivities and the first Indo-Pak Punjab Games, this city is coming to terms with a disclosure Thursday that eyes of dead people from a destitute home were sold.
Balbir Singh, the head of Pingla refuge centre, whom police arrested Wednesday, admitted he had helped local doctors remove eyes from nearly 50 bodies.
The bodies vandalised were those of mentally retarded, infirm and indigent people, who used to seek help from the refuge.
Police said Balbir Singh was at the centre of the eye-sale racket that involved at least four leading private doctors.
The involvement of a local government hospital and government doctors was not being ruled out.
Though Balbir admitted helping doctors take out the eyes from the dead bodies, he denied selling the eyes.
"I was only doing good for others who would be able to see with the transplanted eyes," he said.
The eye-sale racket was exposed this week when an assistant with a city eye surgeon was taking a few eyes out of a government hospital.
Police, already on the trail of the racket, arrested the eye surgeon's assistant.
He admitted that the eye-sale racket had been going on for some time.
--Indo-Asian News Service