Mumbai: Three persons who were black marketing and hoarding Remdesivir injection, the anti-viral medication which has seen a shortage as Maharashtra sees an all-time high in COVID-19 cases, were arrested by Malvani police on Tuesday evening.
According to Malvani police officials, they received a tip-off that a man was coming to sell Remdesivir injections at Rs 20,000 per vial and a trap was laid near Charkop Naka in Malvani.
A team of police and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials reached the spot and planned to send an informer as a decoy to the man selling the injections. At around 7.30pm, a man along with one of his accomplice approached the decoy customer with three vials of Remdesivir injections valued at ₹20,000 each, collectively worth ₹60,000.
The Malwani police then caught the accused red handed while selling the Remdesivir injections. The accused were later identified as Rizwan Arif Ghalib Hussain Mansuri, 32 and Siddharth Keshavprasad Yadav, 21. Police learnt that Mansuri was a doctor by profession.
"During the preliminary investigations, Mansuri and Yadav revealed that they had procured the Remdesivir injections from a medical representative, Chiranjeev Vishwakarma, 28, who was to meet them to collect the money. Acting on this information, police laid a trap and apprehended Vishwakarma as well," said Shekhar Bhalerao, senior inspector of Malvani police station. Vishwakarma revealed that he had purchased the injection vials from a pharmacy store in Hayyat Hospital.
Based on this information, a team of policemen and FDA officials reached the pharmacy store in Hayyat Hospital, wherein they found suspicious entries and sales, following which the drugs inspector initiated a probe and submitted the primary report to their superiors. The pharmacy store is now under scrutiny and will be ascertained if they have any role to play in black marketing and hoarding of Remdesivir injections, added Bhalerao