Three men, including a Bachelor of Unani Medicine and Surgery (BUMS) doctor, have been arrested for alleged black marketing of remdesivir vials, which is used for treatment of Covid-19 and is in high demand due to scarce supply. Three vials valued at Rs 59,000 on the black market have been recovered from them and probe is underway to find out how many vials have been sold so far, police said. The accused have been identified as Rizwann Arif Mansoori, 32, a BUMS doctor who works in an ambulance and is a resident of Ganesh Nagar, Kandivali (west), Siddharth Yadav, 21, a student and resident of Neelkant Nagar in Kandivali (west) and Chiranjivi Vishwakarma, a medical representative and a resident of Laljipada in Kandivali (west). Acting on a tip-off that remdesivir vials were being black marketed in Malad, a special monitoring team from Malwani police station laid a trap and sent a decoy customer to the location. On Tuesday at 7.30 pm, two accused, Mansoori and Yadav, were caught at Charkop naka in Malwani when they accepted Rs 59,000 and sold the three vials. The arrest was made in the presence of two witnesses and an inspector from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) department. On questioning, Yadav told police that he bought the remdesivir from Vishwakarma. Soon afterwards, Vishwakarma was trapped while taking a commission from Yadav. "Vishwakarma said he bought the vials from a medical store inside Hayyat hospital in Malwani, Malad (west). An FDA team is now investigating the hospital authorities. We will produce the accused before a magistrate court on Wednesday. We suspect they have black marketed more vials," said Shekhar Bhalerao, Senior Inspector of Malwani police station.
