Uzbekistan on Monday handed out sentences to twenty-one people, including one Indian, linked to the deaths of 68 minors who consumed a contaminated cough syrup produced in India.

At least eighty-six children were poisoned in Uzbekistan between 2022 and 2023, of whom sixty-eight died.

Indian national Singh Raghvendra Pratap, the director of a company that imported the Doc-1 Max syrup into the Central Asian country, was given the harshest sentence of twenty years.

He was found guilty of corruption, forgery, and tax fraud, according to the Supreme Court of Uzbekistan.

Samples of the syrup revealed it was contaminated with either ethylene glycol or diethylene glycol, which are toxic substances used as industrial solvents that can be fatal if ingested even in small amounts, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in January last year.

The Indian government subsequently canceled the production license for Marion Biotech, which developed cough syrups.

Indian Syrup Causes Deaths in Various Countries

During the same period, at least seventy minors died in Gambia from acute kidney failure after consuming another syrup imported from India.

In Indonesia, another syrup in similar containers caused the deaths of over two hundred minors between 2022 and 2023.