Police in Nagpur district in Maharashtra arrested a man from Uttar Pradesh in connection with a fake medicine racket unearthed in March 2023, an official told PTI on Sunday.
A team from Kalmeshwar police station in Nagpur district recently arrested Raman Vijayakumar Taneja from Saharanpur, UP, he said.
In March 2023, the Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allegedly collected samples of “ciprofloxacin” tablets from a state-run healthcare facility in Kalmeshwar tehsil, about 40 kilometres from Nagpur, and sent them to a government laboratory in Mumbai for testing.
According to the PTI report, the test report, which arrived in December 2023, showed that the tablets had no medicinal value as they had no traces of ciprofloxacin, which is prescribed to treat a number of bacterial infections, police said.
Since the medicines were reportedly supplied by the Nagpur-based Indira Gandhi Medical College and Government Hospital, FDA officers raided the hospital’s store earlier this year and seized 21,600 tablets of the same brand.
According to the news agency report, the police said the tablet strips showed that they had been manufactured by a Gujarat-based company, which did not even exist.
The initial arrests included the main suspect from Thane, Vijay Shailendra Choudhary, Hemant Dhondiba Mule from Latur and Mihir Trivedi, a resident of Bhiwandi.
During the investigation, Taneja’s name emerged, the official said, adding that Choudhary was also arrested recently, PTI reported.
Meanwhile, in a tragic accident on Samruddhi Highway, seven people were killed and four others injured on Friday night. According to the highway police, a car traveling on the wrong side of the road collided with an SUV heading towards Mumbai. The incident occurred after one of the cars stopped to refuel.
One of the injured was talking to his wife when the head-on collision occurred. Three of the seven deceased are residents of Malad. The injured were immediately given first aid at Jalna district hospital and then shifted to Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar.
The seven bodies were flown to Mumbai for autopsy.
(with input from PTI)