"The three sold unclaimed bodies brought for autopsy at the Civil Lines Postmortem House," police inspector Anil Kumar Raghav said in Moradabad, about 350 km from Lucknow.
"The three were arrested following a late night operation Wednesday during which we came across two unattended bodies with fake post-mortem certificates. There was not even a single cut on the two bodies," he said.
Pankaj Giri, pharmacist Hari Singh and his associate Anand Kumar used to sell these corpses to private medical colleges where they were used for experiments, he added.
A case under multiple sections of the Indian Penal Code has been registered against them.
"We cannot rule out the possibility of the involvement of other health department officials," Raghav added.