China is suspected of recruiting surgeons to remove organs from living prisoners, according to new Australian research.
A study by the Australian National University examined thousands of medical documents from China and revealed the nation’s secret organ harvesting trade.
Organ harvesting from executed prisoners is currently legal in China.
However, this new study claims that the prisoners were operated on while they were still alive.
Human rights activists said the evidence “tells a horrible story of killings and mutilations in China” and that the stories coming out of the country are “almost too horrible to believe”.
The role of the study, which was published in the American Journal of Transplantation, was to determine whether a prisoner was classified as “brain dead” before his organs were removed for collection.
In 71 cases, “brain death cannot be announced,” according to Chinese transplant records.
Matthew Robertson, a doctoral researcher and co-author of the report, said: “In these cases, the removal of the heart during organ harvesting must have been the immediate cause of the donor’s death.
“Since these organ donors could only be prisoners, our finding strongly suggests that doctors in the People’s Republic of China have been involved in organ harvesting,” he added.
The operations were carried out on both death row inmates and prisoners of conscience – people who are in prison for what they are or what they believe in, it is alleged.
Mr. Robertson and co-author Jacob Lavi, a cardiac surgeon, believe that the true number of deaths in surgery is much higher.
They say the practice, which China denies, has been going on for three decades, with other organs such as the liver and kidneys believed to have been removed.
While the waiting time for organ transplants in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States is measured in months and years, the waiting time in China is a matter of weeks.
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