The Health Directorate has cancelled all approvals it had given earlier to JKG Health Care to collect Covid-19 samples.
The cancellation was confirmed through an office order, signed by the additional director general of Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) on Wednesday morning.
The order came to light right after a team of Dhaka Metropolitan Police arrested three officials of JKG Health Care including Ariful Chowdhury, the chief executive officer (CEO), for giving false reports of coronavirus to people who provided samples to get tested at their facility.
According to the office order, JKG Health Care received sample collection approval on April 6, while it took till April 16 to receive all other necessary permissions for setting up kiosks and arranging training from the health directorate.
Several times, people who went to their kiosks to give samples alleged that there were middlemen at the booths who would collect their contact information and send them back to their home without taking samples.
Later someone from the organization would contact them and offer to collect the samples from their home for Tk5,000 to Tk8,000.
It also took three to six days to give results of the test as they were submitting more than double the samples to the labs in violation of what they were asked to collect per day.
They were so reckless that they even misbehaved with the DGHS officials in front of the directorate general (DG) of DGHS.
As their corruption was unearthed by media reports, the DG himself on June 23 asked the NGO to collect a limited amount of samples that were permitted to them.
During a visit to the JKG’s training centre at Government Titumir College, it was seen empty and the booths at the place were found in a bad state.
The officer and staffs of the JKG Health Care also reportedly attacked one of the staff of the college.
Nur Mohammad who was attacked by the JKG Health Care staff on June 2, said they were not permitted to enter the area where the training was going on.
Still, whenever they visited JKG’s training facility, they had never seen any activities of conducting training or collecting samples.
He said: “It’s like a resting place for them. Their staffs were using rooms in four buildings. They had never cleaned up the place although they were supposed to do so.”
“Even they had some sort of a picnic-like program last Friday at the auditorium building but the waste is still there. They have neither cleaned the waste nor have they let us clean it. The waste was still at the auditorium gate till Wednesday afternoon,” he added.
They left the place hastily on Tuesday afternoon taking all their equipment, Nur Mohammad said.
Meanwhile, the city’s Tejgaon police station has produced the five arrestees before the court where the court granted two days remand for JKG Health Care CEO Ariful Chowdhury, and his alleged associates Sayeed Chowdhury, Biplob Das, and Mamunur Rashid.
Dhaka Court’s General Recording Officer Sub-Inspector Shaheed Mia confirmed the matter to Dhaka Tribune and said that police sought for 10-days remand each.
Meanwhile, other two arrestees Humayun Kabir and his wife Tanjina Patwary have given confessional statement for the crimes to the court recorded by the Dhaka Metropolitan Magistrate Atiqul Islam.
The two were sent to the jail, the SI said.
On Tuesday, Police arrested five and later arrested another at night in separate drives in the capital for their involvement in a Covid-19 testing scam.