Tag: organ trafficking

  • Kosovo promises to co-operate with EU organ-trafficking probe

    Kosovo promises to co-operate with EU organ-trafficking probe

    AFP/Pristina

    Kosovo government yesterday expressed its commitment to cooperate with the EU in the probe into a Council of Europe report linking the prime minister and others to human organ-trafficking.

    “The government of Kosovo has been ready from the beginning to co-operate and is co-operating … with international justice,” Deputy Prime Minister Hajredin Kuci told reporters.

    “The sooner the truth is known, the easier it will be for Kosovo and its citizens,” he said, adding that his country would not allow itself to be tarnished by “someone’s insinuations”.

    Meanwhile , the EU mission in Kosovo (EULEX) announced that it had charged a Turkish and an Israeli citizen over alleged illegal organ transplants at a private clinic in Kosovo.

    The Turkish suspect, Yusuf Sonmez, is considered by the Kosovo media as the world’s most infamous organ trafficker.

    He was even labeled by the press as the “Turkish Frankenstein” as he is barred from practicing medicine in Turkey.

    The charges, which bring the total number of accused to nine, are related to the Medicus Clinic in Pristina, which was closed in November 2008 by Kosovo police after a months-long investigation.

    Health Secretary Ilir Rrecaj, who is one of seven suspected locals in the case, was sacked by the health minister for having signed the licence.

    The trafficking network came to light after a hint accidentally given by a young Turkish citizen, whose kidney had just been removed in the Medicus clinic for transplant to an Israeli citizen.

    He collapsed at the Pristina airport waiting for a flight to Turkey on his way home and required medical assistance.

    EULEX said on Friday that it had set up a task force to intensify its probe in the light of the findings of a Council of Europe report linking Prime Minister Hashim Thaci and other high-ranking members of his Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) to human organ trafficking.

    The force, to include prosecutors and investigators, will reinforce a preliminary investigation launched by EULEX in late January.

    The Council of Europe’s special rapporteur, senator Dick Marty, said in a report released in December that Thaci headed a Kosovo guerrilla faction that controlled secret detention centres where Kosovo Serbs and Albanians considered collaborators were held in Albania.

    He reported allegations that human organ trafficking took place in three of these centres in the aftermath of the 1998-99 war between the Kosovo Liberation Army’s (KLA) guerrillas and Serbian forces.

    Thaci, who was one of the most prominent leaders of the KLA, has hit back denying the allegations and vowing to sue Marty for libel.

    via Gulf Times – Qatar’s top-selling English daily newspaper – Europe/World.

  • The Rise of the Red Market

    The Rise of the Red Market

    How the best intentions of the medical community accidentally created an international organ-trafficking underground.

    BY SCOTT CARNEY | MAY 30, 2011

    kidneysOn the night of Jan. 11, Turkish police officers burst into a villa in Istanbul’s Asian quarter and arrested a 53-year-old transplant surgeon named Yusuf Sonmez. Interpol had been looking for Sonmez since 2008, when a Turkish man collapsed in the airport in Pristina, Kosovo, and reported that his kidney had been stolen. The incident led to an investigation by European Union prosecutors, who uncovered an international organ-stealing and smuggling ring of alarming scope. Sonmez and eight co-conspirators, prosecutors alleged in December, had lured poor people from Central Asia and Europe to Pristina, harvested their organs, and sold them at up to $100,000 a pop to medical tourists from Canada, Germany, Israel, and Poland. The clinic where Sonmez did his work, a separate report by the Council of Europe alleged, was part of an even vaster organ-smuggling network — one which, incredibly, even involved Kosovo’s prime minister, Hashim Thaci.

    The trafficking operation was grisly, but hardly unusual. The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 10 percent of the world’s organ transplants originate on the black market; as a rule of thumb, that figure seems to hold true across the trade in human body parts. And while occasional law enforcement successes like Sonmez’s arrest do happen, for the most part no one is really seriously attempting to shut down a market that is not just lucrative, but, many would argue, inevitable.

    It would be an understatement to say that the last century has been a golden age for medical science. The average human life span today is almost a 30 years longer than it was in 1900. We’ve seen the advent of once-unthinkable innovations such as antibiotics, blood transfusions, and the surgical wizardry of organ transplants. These once-miraculous feats depend on a supply infrastructure that those of us outside the medical profession rarely think about. We take it for granted that if we get into a car accident that the local hospital will have blood on hand for a lifesaving transfusion. If our kidneys fail, we expect a spot on the transplant list. If we are infertile, we expect to have access to someone else’s sperm or eggs, or — if we can afford it — the services of a surrogate mother to bring a child to term.

    Of course, every kidney, cornea, or pint of blood has to come from somewhere — or, more precisely, someone. Forget the image of grass-skirt-wearing cannibals on tropical islands; no society has had as insatiable an appetite for human flesh as the developed world of the 21st century.

    Because the idea of a marketplace in which body parts are bought and sold makes us squeamish, the growth in demand for human materials has been accompanied by an effort to build an ethically justifiable system for supplying them. Organs aren’t supposed to be bought and sold; rather, they are donated by altruistic individuals, and we pay for the services necessary to acquire them rather than for the organ itself.

    There’s just one problem with this picture: It’s a fiction. Regulation of the supply of human tissue is haphazard at best; in most cases, people looking to acquire an organ have only the assurances of doctors and social workers to persuade them that everything is aboveboard and ethical. And the very provisions we’ve built into the system to bring it in line with the ethical norms of medicine and charity have made it easy for criminals to reap outlandish profits buying and selling human flesh.

    Half a century ago, the world was relatively comfortable with open commerce in human products. The rollback of that business, and the institution of the system we have today, began with blood. As of the mid-1960s, blood-collection clinics in the United States were amassing 6 million pints of blood a year, for which they paid about $25 apiece at the time to donors. The model was a holdover from World War II, when blood was badly needed for the war effort. But as the collecting centers became as common as cash-for-gold franchises in skid rows across the United States, they began to present problems for the medical system. Because poorer and accordingly less healthy people were more likely to sell their blood for a quick buck, paid blood collection led to higher rates of hepatitis transmission.

    In the 1970s, a British social anthropologist named Richard Titmuss proposed a new system, one that would remove the risk of coercion and problematic incentives by eliminating payments to blood donors. In addition, the blood would be depersonalized — marked with an identifying bar code rather than a name — so that the recipient would feel indebted to the overall system of blood donation rather than a single individual. Officially, at least, blood was transformed from a product into a gift.

    via The Rise of the Red Market – By Scott Carney | Foreign Policy.

  • The doctor at the heart of Kosovo’s organ scandal

    The doctor at the heart of Kosovo’s organ scandal

    The Turkish donor and the Israeli recipient were laid down on beds beside each other before the kidney was exchanged. Both men would later confirm that their eyes met for a brief few seconds before the anaesthetic took effect.

    Yilman Altun, 23, was the desperate young Turk who said he was promised a rich reward for his organ by a broker in Istanbul. Alongside him lay Bezalel Shafran, a 74-year-old Israeli who had paid £76,400 for the black-market kidney he hoped would prolong his life.

    According to an indictment released this week, the surgeon transferring the kidney between these strangers in the Medicus clinic in a deprived suburb near the Kosovan capital, Pristina, was Yusuf Ercin Sonmez, a 53-year-old medic.

    Yusuf Ercin Sonmez 007

    Sonmez, a Turkish surgeon, is now the subject of an international manhunt. Prosecutors allege he played a central role in the illegal organ transplant clinic, and this week an official inquiry linked the trade to Kosovo’s prime minister, Hashim Thaci.

    Sonmez, a notorious figure known as “Doctor Vulture”, is wanted by Interpol for “crimes against life and health, people smuggling, trafficking and illegal immigration”. An investigation by the Guardian established Sonmez as having been a key player in the unscrupulous organ market for more than 10 years. He was seen this year in Azerbaijian, where, intelligence sources believe, he was doing kidney transplants at the university hospital in Baku.

    Azerbaijan’s prosecutor-general’s office said last month that an investigation prompted by information from Ukranian police found “citizens of various countries” had been brought into the country for illegal kidney transplants. Four Ukrainian doctors have been arrested in connection with the alleged racket. Azerbaijani press reported that Sonmez was “involved” in the ring, which also did operations in Ecuador. At a press conference in Baku this year, which took place before the warrant for his arrest was made public, Sonmez reportedly denied involvement in organ trafficking.

    According to a charge read out on Tuesday by the EU prosecutor Jonathan Ratel, the alleged role of Sonmez in the Medicus clinic became clear when police raided the property in November 2008. The inquiry had been opened just hours earlier, after Altun, the Turk, fainted at Pristina airport. When officials found an fresh wound on his abdomen, he told them his kidney had been stolen.

    Four anaesthetists and a former permanent secretary in the health ministry, who prosecutors allege abused his office to give Medicus a false licence, have pleaded not guilty. So too has Lutfi Dervishi, Kosovo’s leading urologist, who is accused of setting up the clinic with his son, Arban. Ratel told the court that victims were duped “with the false promise of payments” for their kidneys.

    When the Guardian visited Medicus this week, surgical gowns for the Russians, Moldovans, Kazakhs and Turks intending to lose their organs could be seen through the windows. So too could cardboard boxes containing medical supplies printed with the name Sonmez.

    Dervishi, who still works at Pristina university hospital, was using Medicus business cards and phone numbers in another clinic nearby. He refused to speak to the Guardian this week.

    But it is Sonmez who prosecutors believe has been the central figure in the trafficking. The Turk has been repeatedly arrested for organ transplants in his native country, where colleagues describe him as an accomplished but rebellious surgeon. In 1998, Turkish TV, whose reporters posed as donors, found seven patients, mostly from Israel. Sonmez was later banned from working in Turkey’s public health sector.

    Since then he has been linked to clinics operating on donors and recipients from across the world. He has admitted to doing thousands of transplants, but says that his donors sign disclaimer forms declaring they are giving their organs for humanitarian purposes.

    Police found such forms at Medicus, along with a “vast quantity” of medical equipment and records of all the transplants, according to Ratel, who said that up to 30 victims lost their kidneys in the clinic in just eight months in 2008. Patients from Canada, Germany, Poland and Israel had received organ transplants at the clinic. But despite promises of payment of up to €20,000, the donors had left empty-handed, he said.

    A Council of Europe report into organ trafficking in Kosovo linked the Medicus case to a wider criminal network in the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which began trading in organs in 1999. A faction within the rebel guerilla army loyal to Thaci has been accused of overseeing a racket involving Serb captives. A “handful” were said, in the report, to have been shot in the head, then had their kidneys extracted. It is believed the kidneys were flown to Istanbul in ischemia bags. Thaci has strongly denied the claims.

    A Washington-based intelligence source said the kidneys were sold to Sonmez. It was then that the Turkish doctor was said to have struck up a relationship with Kosovan Albanians, who, investigators believe, are implicated in the Medicus clinic case which unfolded in the confirmation hearing case this week. A judge in Pristina district court will decide whether there is sufficient evidence to proceed to trial.

    “In many respects the two are similar operations. In both cases, you’ve got illegal outfits linking senior players among the Kosovar Albanians trading in the organs of innocent victims, playing into an international racket to profit from the surgeries of Sonmez,” a source said.

    via The doctor at the heart of Kosovo’s organ scandal | World news | The Guardian.

  • Kosovo physicians accused of organ trafficking racket

    Kosovo physicians accused of organ trafficking racket

    kosovo 1785564cThe men, including a former senior Kosovan Health Ministry official, promised poor people from Moldova, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkey up to €14,500 (£12,300) for their organs.

    Those who received the organs – including patients from Canada, Germany, Poland and Israel – paid between €80,000 and €100,000 for them, Ratel said. The victims, however, were never paid, the European Union prosecutor Jonathan Ratel told Pristina District Court.

    He alleged that the “organ-harvesting ring” recruited about 20 foreign nationals with false promises of payments in 2008.

    The seven men have pleaded not guilty to charges ranging from trafficking in persons to unlawful practices of medicine and abuse of power. Two other suspects, a Turkish and an Israeli national, remain at large.

    The prosecution has alleged that Kosovo surgeon Lutfi Dervishi, who is also linked to the Kosovo Liberation Army’s alleged kidnapping and killing of Serb civilians for their organs, is the ringleader of the group.

    According to the court’s indictment, he attended a medical conference in Turkey in 2006 and asked for someone who could perform organ transplants. He was contacted by a Turkish man, Dr. Yusuf Sonmez, six months later.

    Mr Dervishi and Dr Sonmez then allegedly carried out operations in a private medical clinic in the capital, Pristina, run by Mr Dervishi’s son, Arban, who has also been indicted.

    The indictment says an Israeli citizen, Moshe Harel, was allegedly involved in identifying, recruiting and transporting victims and “ensuring the delivery of cash payments prior to surgery.”

    Four other Kosovans, doctors Sokol Hajdini and Driton Jilta, and anaesthetists, Islam Bytyqi and Sylejman Dulla, are also indicted.

    Dr Sonmez and Mr Harel are listed as wanted by Interpol.

    Police were alerted to the network in November 2008, when a Turkish man, Yilmaz Altun, appeared exhausted at Pristina airport while waiting to board a flight home. When questioned by police, he said he had donated his kidney to an Israeli recipient. Kosovo law forbids the removal and transplant of organs.

    All have denied the Kosovo court’s accusations.

    Allegations of the Kosovo Liberation Army’s alleged trade in civilian organs stem from a book by U.N. War Crimes tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, based on information she has said she received from Western journalists.

    In response to the allegations, Swiss senator Dick Marty led a Council of Europe team of investigators to Kosovo and Albania in 2009.

    The council’s report is to be released to the public in France on Thursday.

    The two year Council of Europe investigation also alleged that Kosovo’s prime minister, Hashim Thaci, was the head of an organised crime ring in the late 1990s that was involved in organ trafficking, assassinations and other crimes.

    According to the draft report, Western powers were complicit in ignoring the activities of the crime ring headed by Mr Thaci.

    “Thaci and these other ‘Drenica Group’ members are consistently named as ‘key players’ in intelligence reports on Kosovo’s mafia-like structures of organised crime,” the report said.

    “We found that the ‘Drenica Group’ had as its chief – or, to use the terminology of organised crime networks, its ‘boss’ – the renowned political operator … Hashim Thaci.”

    In an interview yesterday before the report was released, Mr Thaci said he would not tolerate corruption in his government.

    Kosovo’s government on Tuesday described the report as baseless and defamatory.

    via Kosovo physicians accused of organ trafficking racket – Telegraph.

  • Tera Incognita: Bloody coexistence

    Tera Incognita: Bloody coexistence

    By SETH J.FRANTZMAN
    11/23/2010 22:48

    The bizarre horror and roots of the Kosovo organ-trafficking ring; almost all those involved were respected professionals in their communities.

    irish soldierIn mid-November, the world media reported that Interpol was hunting for seven members of an organ-trafficking ring. They were accused of operating a clinic called Medicus in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. Most news media were excited to reveal that two Israelis were among those named in the 46-page Interpol report. Less interest was shown in the other international members of the ring – Turkish and Albanian Muslims.

    Only one Israeli, Moshe Harel, was wanted by Interpol in connection with the ring. The other Israeli, Zaki Shapira, was listed as an unindicted coconspirator. A Turkish doctor and five Albanians were also indicted for their role in diverse criminal activities such as “trafficking in persons and unlawful exercise of medical activity.”

    THE ORIGINS of the ring appear relatively recent. According to reports, Lutfi Dervishi, a urologist and professor at Pristina University, visited Istanbul in 2006 to attend a conference. At the conference he let it be known that he was looking for someone who could perform organ transplants. He was contacted by Yusuf Sonmez, a Turkish national and surgeon who has a history of involvement with illegal organ harvesting.

    Sonmez maintains a website which claims he completed his residency in surgery at Istanbul University medical faculty in 1984 and was an expert in kidney transplants. According to a November 3 article in Hurriyet he also worked at the Ministry of Health. He completed his first transplant from a live donor in 1993, and by 2006 claimed he had performed more than,1,300 kidney transplants. In 2005 he was running a private hospital in Istanbul. Turkish websites indicate that his hospital was shut down in 2007 after a police raid, during which his brother Bulent was also detained. He received a suspended sentence.

    Sonmez again fell out with the law over organ thefts in 2008. His medical license was revoked and he was banned from the profession for six months – which news outlets criticized as too weak a punishment. At the time Turkish articles called him the “the Turkish butcher” and Hurriyet referred to him as “Frankenstein.” In 2010, when it emerged that he was involved with organ trafficking in Kosovo, he turned up inAzerbaijan, apparently free to go about his bloody business. His status at present is not clear.

    In 2006, while at the height of his power, operating his own clinic prior to the police raids, he contacted Dervishi. Sonmez then contacted a Turkish-Israeli, Harel, who according to the government of Kosovo was born in 1950 in Turkey. Harel later allegedly “identified, recruited and transported the victims, as well as managed the cash payments before the surgeries.” Sonmez, it seems, was also the contact for Shapira, who has a history of brushes with the law regarding organ harvesting.

    Shapira was once head of kidney transplant services at Beilinson Medical Center in Petah Tikva. He was also a member of the Bellagio Task Force on global transport ethics. In the 1990s he ran afoul of ethics charges in Israel and moved to Turkey. In 2007 Shapira was arrested in Turkey; it seems he was already connected with Sonmez’s hospital. Now Sonmez brought Harel and Shapira to Pristina to help run Dervishi’s clinic. The clinic was operated by Dervishi’s son, Arban. Illir Rrecaj, a Kosovo Health Ministry official, granted the clinic a license to do urological checkups but was, according to Interpol, privy to the actual goings on there.

    In October 2008 police suspicions were raised when a poor man was dumped at the Pristina airport and it was found his kidney had been removed. A raid on the Medicus clinic discovered that the organ harvesting ring had been bringing in poverty stricken patients from countries such as Turkey and Russia, promising them 15,000 euros, and then selling their organs for upward of 100,000 euros. Rrecaj was dismissed from his post. On November 4, Harel was arrested.

    BUT ACCORDING to other sources it appears the tentacles of the case go deeper.

    The Serbian newspaper Blic claims that Dervishi was also involved in the murder and harvesting of organs from Serbs who were captured by ethnic Albanian terrorists during the Kosovo war of 1999. After the war there were rumors that Kosovar Albanians were keeping Serb prisoners in camps near the Kosovo border with Albania.

    A Spanish KFOR contingent attempted to penetrate the village of Vrelo but was called back. Carla Del Ponte, the former chief prosecutor of the UN for war crimes committed in Yugoslavia, claimed in her 2008 book that as many as 300 Serbs were murdered for their organs just across the border in the Albanian town of Burrel. The infamous “clinic” in Burrel became known as the “yellow house,” but not until 2004 was it visited by a UN team to investigate the accusations. By then, only a few traces of blood remained.

    According to Blic, in 1998 during the Kosovo crises, “[a] witness told Serbian war crimes prosecutors that he saw Dr. Lutfi Dervishi at locations where it was suspected that organs had been extracted from civilian prisoners and sold later.” Another Serbian source alleges that Shapira was also involved in 1999 in instructing those who harvested the organs, and according to the Croatian magazine Politika, he showed up in Macedonia in the same year, connected to a similar operation.

    This claim is based on the fact that he had Turkish connections who were supporting the Kosovars during the war.

    Whatever the case, it seems the recent organ-trafficking scandal is merely the latest emergence of the dark cloud that has hung over Kosovo for years; it has become a center for human and organ trafficking in Europe.

    What makes the present case so shocking is that almost all those involved were respected professionals in their communities.A professor from Pristina, a member of the Kosovo Health Ministry, an Istanbul doctor and pioneer in organ transplants and a former head of transplant services at Beilinson. What made these men turn evil? What sort of strange dark coexistence is this, where Turks and Israelis work together to steal organs?

    Does their ring have its origins in the dirty war fought in Kosovo in 1998-1999? The anti-Israel and anti-Semitic media like to shed light on supposed Israeli involvement in organ trafficking, but what this case shows is that the networks behind the story have much deeper and more disturbing roots.

  • 7 Charged in Kosovo-Based Organ-Trafficking Ring

    7 Charged in Kosovo-Based Organ-Trafficking Ring

    By DAN BILEFSKY

    Published: November 15, 2010

    PRAGUE — At least seven people have been charged with participating in an international organ-trafficking network based in Kosovo that sold kidneys and other organs from impoverished victims for up to $200,000 to patients from as far away as Israel and Canada, police and senior European Union officials said Monday.

    Police officials said that the Medicus clinc in Pristina, Kosovo, was secretly transformed by Dr. Lutfi Dervishi into a hub for illegal organ transplants.
    Police officials said that the Medicus clinc in Pristina, Kosovo, was secretly transformed by Dr. Lutfi Dervishi into a hub for illegal organ transplants.

    According to the indictment, the traffickers lured people from slums in Istanbul, Moscow, Moldova and Kazakhstan with promises of up to $20,000 for their organs. Law enforcement officials say many never received a cent. The operations were performed at a private clinic in a run-down neighborhood on the outskirts of Pristina, the Kosovar capital.

    While the ring was first discovered two years ago, the global scale of the network and its victims is only now becoming clear.

    Officials said the ringleader was a highly regarded surgeon and professor at Pristina University Hospital, Dr. Lutfi Dervishi. The clinic was run by his son, Arban. Also charged was Ilir Rrecaj, a senior official in Kosovo’s Health Ministry when the ring was broken. They and two others are accused of crimes including trafficking in humans and body parts, unlawful medical activity, participating in organized crime, and abuse of office. All were released on bail.

    The charges have shaken Kosovo, which has been struggling to integrate with the West since it declared independence from Serbia in February 2008. The case is also a test of the nascent legal institutions and rule of law as Kosovo seeks to overcome a culture of endemic lawlessness and corruption that has reached the highest levels of government.

    The trafficking network’s tentacles reached far. Warrants were issued for a Turkish doctor and an Israeli financier, and two other doctors, an Israeli and a Turk, were named as co-conspirators.

    The police said the ring had its roots at a medical conference in 2006 in Istanbul, where Dr. Dervishi met the Turkish doctor being sought, Yusuf Sonmez. Law enforcement officials describe Dr. Sonmez as a notorious international organ trafficker.

    The Medicus clinic had been founded by a European philanthropist who aided ethnic Albanian doctors during the war in Kosovo in 1999. Dr. Dervishi, police officials said, secretly transformed it into a hub for illegal organ transplants, which were performed by Dr. Sonmez.

    The indictment was first reported by The Associated Press. In it, a European Union prosecutor, Jonathan Ratel, said that in 2008, 20 foreign nationals living in “extreme poverty or acute financial distress” were “recruited with the false promises of payments.”

    The police said they broke the ring in November of that year, when a young Turkish man, Yilman Altun, was found at the Pristina airport, weak and frail. Mr. Altun told the police that his kidney had been stolen. When the police raided the Medicus clinic, they discovered an elderly Israeli man who had received Mr. Altun’s kidney.

    European Union officials said that the indictment in the case had been filed in district court in Kosovo and that a preliminary hearing was expected by the end of the year. If a judge confirms the charges, a trial will follow.

    The European Union has a large law enforcement mission in Kosovo to combat crime and corruption. But that fight has proved difficult, with suspicions of bribes, money laundering, organized crime, fraud and now organ trafficking, ensnaring high-level government officials.

    Several countries are examining the Kosovo ring, with police investigators combing through the phone records, computer hard drives and bank transfers of those charged. European Union officials said the recipients paid for the kidneys by bank transfers, helping lead the police to the main suspects.

    Western law enforcement officials said they suspected the ring might be part of a larger criminal network whose nexus was in Israel. In September, five doctors from South Africa were charged with participating in an international kidney-trading syndicate in which dozens of poor Brazilians and Romanians were paid for kidneys for wealthy Israelis. Analysts said the organ-trafficking case was part of a disturbing global trend in which unscrupulous traffickers take advantage of the growing waiting lists of desperate patients and the vulnerability of poor people further buffeted by the international financial crisis.

    In the United States, more than 109,000 people are on the waiting list for organ transplants, mostly kidneys, and 18 die each day, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which manages the American transplant system.

    A version of this article appeared in print on November 16, 2010, on page A4 of the New York edition.

    via 7 Charged in Kosovo-Based Organ-Trafficking Ring – NYTimes.com.