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14 arrested in Brazil and South Africa for alleged human organ traffic
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Michael Wines NYT
Friday, December 5, 2003
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JOHANNESBURG The police here and in Brazil say they have arrested 14 people in a trans-Atlantic scheme to buy human organs from impoverished Brazilians for sale to desperate and ailing recipients in South African hospitals.
One of those arrested, a 42-year-old Israeli man, was taken into custody as he checked out of a private hospital in Durban on Wednesday, five days after receiving a newly transplanted kidney.
The organ sale scheme, which the Brazilian police said was apparently run by Israelis, had been under investigation for a year, a South African Police Service senior superintendent, Mary Martins-Engelbrecht, said on Thursday. Most if not all of the organ transactions appear to have involved kidneys.
The ring was broken up Wednesday with the nearly simultaneous arrests of two Israelis and nine Brazilians in Recife in northeastern Brazil, and two men, both of Israeli descent, in Durban on South Africa's Indian Ocean coast.
Late on Thursday, the police in Johannesburg said they had arrested another person, a 58-year-old South African man whom they did not identify but described as a potentially significant member of the ring.
That man was to be arraigned on Friday in a Durban court on charges of violating the Human Tissue Act, which bars the sale of human organs. Those arrested in Recife were charged under a similar Brazilian law. Martins-Engelbrecht said in a telephone interview on Thursday that the inquiry, which has been aided by Interpol, was far from over. She said the arrests on Thursday were the first. "We expect to make more."
Separately, she told South African Broadcasting Corporation radio that investigators were looking to countries beyond Brazil, Israel and South Africa.
According to the police in Brazil, the operators of the ring canvassed poor neighborhoods for people willing to sell one of their kidneys. Those who volunteered were then flown to South Africa, where the transplants were performed.
In Johannesburg, The Star newspaper reported Thursday that the transplant ring had bought organs for up to $10,000 and charged recipients as much as $120,000. The newspaper stated that the transplants had been performed in Durban at St. Augustine's Hospital, a prestigious, century-old medical center run by Netcare, a well-regarded South African chain of private hospitals and clinics. Netcare officials issued a statement on Thursday saying only that the company been aiding the police investigation for some time, and that hospital officials had not known of any illegal financial arrangements between organ donors and recipients. While no doctors have been arrested in Brazil or South Africa, the police said that they were investigating involvement by medics in both Durban and in Recife, the capital of the state of Pernambuco.
Wilson Damazio, the federal police superintendent in Pernambuco, said that at least 30 people there were believed to have donated kidneys in exchange for up to $10,000, passports and free trips to Durban. "They're mostly poor people just trying to make a better life for themselves," said Manoel Caetano Cysneiros a police spokesman in Recife. "They'll probably buy a house or a small business with that money."
Cysneiros said those arrested were ringleaders and people who had not only donated organs but had encouraged others to do so upon their return to Brazil.
Trafficking in human organs has become a flourishing business as the number of people who donate organs after their death remains relatively flat and worldwide demand for transplants skyrockets. In the United States alone, more than 83,000 people are on an official waiting list for kidney transplants, while fewer than 20,000 such transplants have been performed so far this year.
Some medical ethicists now argue that restrictions on the sale of spare and replaceable organs, such as kidneys and livers, should be loosened to permit a regulated trade in body parts from willing donors to dying recipients.
The New York Times
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