A Woman Died Post Surgery. Police Say Her Doctor Was An Impostor.

Eighty-year-old Saleem Begum was in excruciating pain for weeks from a bedsore. So her family took her to Mayo Hospital, the largest and oldest hospital in the Pakistani city Lahore. 

Inside the hospital, Begum’s son Shafaqaat Ali said a man in full personal protective equipment approached the family on May 17. He identified himself as a doctor and said Begum needed surgery immediately and could perform it for much less money if they went off the books. 

The family agreed and the man, later identified by authorities as Waheed Butt, performed a procedure on Begum with a hospital lab technician, which doctors and police suspect led to her death last weekend.

“Like a novice he brutally cut up the wound, with an incision six inches long and two inches deep, and worked on it for over one hour. There was excessive bleeding. He panicked and asked us to take my mother home and said that he would visit her the next day to dress her wound,” Shafaqaat Ali told VICE World News. 

Begum’s situation continued to deteriorate, so Butt allegedly asked the family to take her back to the hospital. There, the family discovered that Butt was not a surgeon. Police arrested him on fraud charges on May 22, weeks before Begum died. His suspected accomplice, the technician, is still at large.

Authorities are still waiting for Begum’s autopsy report to establish her cause of death and decide whether they want to pursue more serious charges against Butt. The hospital declined to comment.

But Pakistan’s medical community is outraged by the incident and is calling for more accountability at a time when they are grappling with the pandemic.

“It was a murder and he should be given the harshest sentence, as a deterrent. There is an absence of checks and controls, including use of IDs, in most state-run hospitals, allowing such scams with impostors and quacks conning patients,” Khizer Hayat, Chairman of the Young Doctors Association, Punjab told VICE World News.

Authorities said Butt was a former security guard at the hospital and had been fired a year earlier for extorting money from patients. 

“Butt has confessed his crime and said in the past he would visit patients at their homes when he was working at the hospital and charge them fees to change bandages,” Ali Safdar, a Lahore police spokesperson, told VICE World News. 

Hospital staff said Butt managed to sneak his way back into the hospital undetected because he knew the security protocols and because pandemic-related protective equipment made it difficult to establish anyone’s identity.

“With COVID-19 raging, the staff at large hospitals is quite busy, even with CCTV cameras it is difficult to identify people with their masks on,” a hospital employee told VICE World News on condition of anonymity, as hospital staff have been discouraged about speaking to the media about the incident.

Safdar, from the Lahore police, added that Begum’s death has prompted them to crack down on imposters taking advantage of COVID-19 protocols at busy public hospitals. 

Pakistan’s busy public hospitals are no strangers to imposters. In 2016, it was discovered that the medical certificates of a woman, who had been performing surgeries for eight months with other surgeons at Services Hospital, the second largest state-run hospital in Lahore, were fake. 

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