Six people have been jailed in China for illegally harvesting organs. The BBC reports that the trafficking ring included four high-ranking doctors who worked in organ procurement in hospitals. The men involved in the organ trafficking have been sentenced for the “deliberately destroying corpses”.

The group had removed the livers and kidneys from 11 bodies at a hospital in Anhui province. The victims of motor vehicle accidents, and patients who suffered cerebral hemorrhage were targeted. Their families were led to believe they were making official organ donations.

According to the BBC, Huaiyuan County People’s Hospital’s head of the intensive care unit, Yang Suxun, would approach a patient’s family members and ask if they would consent to donating their loved one’s organs. The consent forms family members signed, were, however, fake.

The deceased person would then be wheeled out of the hospital and placed in a vehicle deceptively made to look like an ambulance. The doctors would then remove the organs in the dead of the night. The organs would be sold to individuals or to other hospitals which were secretly contacted by members of the trafficking ring.

The truth emerged when the son of one of the victims became suspicious, when months after his mother’s death in 2018, Shi Xianglin rechecked the documents his had family received, and found inconsistencies. Further, he found that neither provincial authorities nor the China Organ Donation Administrative Centre in Beijing, had any record of his mother’s donation. Yang offered him a large sum of ‘hush’ money when he made inquiries into the matter. Shi alerted the authorities.

China, which is struggling with a massive organ shortage, had for years harvested the organs of executed prisoners. The practice was officially stopped in 2015 following widespread global criticism.

Umm Muhammed Umar