BILASPUR, India, Nov. 14 (UPI) -- Thirteen women who died after sterilization procedures in India may have been given antibiotics tainted with rat poison, law enforcement officials said Friday.
A camp held last weekend, during which 83 women were sterilized, resulted in the deaths of 13 people.
The man who performed the surgeries, Dr. R.K. Gupta, was arrested and charged with negligence and attempted culpable homicide after being accused of using equipment that had not been disinfected.
Gupta said he wasn't to blame for the deaths, it was medication the women took that made them sick.
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Investigators now have reason to believe him after antibiotics were seized in a raid of a pharmaceutical company.
Ciprofloxacin, an antibiotic, seized from the company, Mahawar Pharma was found to contain zinc phosphide.
"If you do a quick Google search, you will find it is rat poison, and the women were displaying symptoms similar to poisoning," Sonmoni Borah, a divisional commissioners in the district of Bilaspur, told The New York Times.
The women who died after sterilization procedures were given ciprofloxacin from Mahawar Pharma.
Investigators were tipped off that perhaps medications were the culprit after women who had the procedure at other clinics began to fall ill. One woman died Monday and two men who were treated for other conditions died Tuesday.
One of the men had been given ciprofloxacin from the same batch as the 13 women who died, said Dr. Ashutosh Tiwari, the head of Narayani Hospital.
Ramesh Mahawar, head of Mahawar Pharma, and his son, Sumeet Mahawar, have been arrested and accused of forgery, Borah told CNN.
It's not yet clear if the antibiotics the dead women took contained any of the rat poison.
Sales of Mahawar products have been banned.
