A 10-year-old street orphan was picked up by a gang of young men and was about to be sold for his bodily organs, but Ukraine’s State Security Service (SBU) prevented the crime just in time.
It’s a drama worthy of Hollywood, and thankfully with a happy ending.
A 10-year-old street orphan was picked up by a gang of young men and was about to be sold for his bodily organs, but Ukraine’s State Security Service (SBU) prevented the crime just in time.
The case served as a chilling reminder that the illegal organ-trafficking business continues to flourish in Ukraine, although no one knows the precise number of victims.
The organs are harvested and sold, driven ultimately by demand from desperate people suffering with terminal illnesses, such as kidney disease, and in need of transplant surgery.
Experts struggle to estimate how many cases of organ theft and trafficking occur in Ukraine each year. Nobody, it seems, is counting. Few involved are punished. But these experts insist Ukraine, like other economically depressed countries, is a hotbed for criminal who seek to buy or steal organs, selling them on the black market for cash.
“All of us are bearing witnesses to Ukraine’s big human-trafficking problem,” said Shivaun Scanlan, senior adviser on anti-trafficking issues at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “Everyone is responsible. We should not stand aside.”
Ukraine has been at the center of organ-trafficking scandals before. Each one reveals how hideous the business can be and exposes the vulnerability of its victims. The one involving the 10-year-old street orphan, identified as Sasha, had its own hideous narrative.
Three men from the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk found the boy at the railway station of Slavyansk in Donetsk Oblast. The men subjected him to a full medical examination to check out his organs, after convincing him that he was on his way to a special sports school.
According to the SBU, the boy was lodged in rented apartments for several months while the gang searched for customers to sell his organs. The asking price was 60,000 euros. They agreed to a more modest sum of $35,000 suggested by the buyer, an undercover SBU agent.
According to an SBU report, during the negotiations, the undercover agent asked the traffickers whether it was possible to remove the boy’s kidneys for transplantation. The answer was: “Do what you want. We’re not interested.”
The men were detained on June 17 after receiving the money and passing the boy to the law enforcers. The trio are currently held in a pre-trial prison in Donetsk on court order and are facing up to 15 years in prison for human organ trafficking.
“The operation was prepared very carefully,” said SBU spokeswoman Maryna Ostapenko. “We knew that the child’s life was at stake.”
Like most victims of the shadowy organ-smuggling business, Sasha was vulnerable. But he was one of the lucky ones. He is now recovering at a summer camp in Crimea.
Other stories have tragic endings.
In 2003, several doctors in a Kharkiv maternity hospital were investigated for stealing and trafficking infant organs. The scandal broke after mothers of newborns noticed an alarming n number of unexplained deaths during birth. Doctors told mothers their babies had inexplicably died.
Under international and domestic pressure, the authorities exhumed about 30 bodies from at the maternity hospital’s cemetery where the infants had been buried. The video of the autopsy showed that organs had been stripped, bodies dismembered.
A senior British forensic pathologist theorized that tissues from the babies may have been sold off for use in harvesting stem cells. To the outrage of many, the case ended with a Hr 850 (about $150) fine being slapped upon the maternity hospital.
In another case in Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast, doctors from a local hospital were accused of illegal soft-tissue transplants. The case has been in and out of court since 2005 due to lack of evidence.
No Ukrainian surgeons have ever been convicted of illegal organ transplantation. One reason is that the organs are often smuggled out to other countries, such as Turkey or Israel, where the surgery is performed.
Kateryna Tarasova, head of the Association of Judges in Ukraine, says that, unfortunately, few cases of organ theft and trafficking get prosecuted in Ukraine due to “careless investigations that result in lack of evidence, inadequate work by prosecutors, corrupt judges and total cover-ups by hospitals.”
In Ukraine, the only legal way to donate an organ is to offer it up to a close relative in need, or to consent to donation in the event of death.
Yet law enforcers say the black-market organ trade is rampant, as cash-strapped citizens struggle to survive in difficult economic realities. Internet websites targeting organ donors from Ukrainian and other Russian-speaking countries are easily found. Some offer organs for sale; others seek donors. Prices vary from $5,000, up to $100,000 for a kidney, for example.
According to a journalistic investigation conducted by the New York Times in 2006, former Soviet republics served as a vast pool of organ donors for Israeli brokers. Organ donors received a maximum of 10 percent of the price paid by the recipient, usually between $100,000 and $150, 000. Donors often received no medical care after the operation.
Ukraine adopted a law in 1999 banning the shadowy organ transplantation business and imposing strict controls, but those controls remain in place mostly on paper. Experts say the business has since gone underground.
Vladyslav Dubyna, head of the Interior Ministry’s department against human trafficking says most of the Internet organ trafficking ads are not real. “People are not serious or just doing some journalistic investigations, like you,” Dubyna said.
But a small percentage of real ads reach their final customers, often outside Ukraine.
“The surgeries are performed outside of Ukraine. Transnational cooperation is essential in tackling such matters. [Otherwise], we can’t punish those who sell their organs,” said Dubyna, reflecting on the problems he has come across in his work.
Dubyna says human organ trafficking rings can be very sophisticated.
A single transaction can cross three continents: A broker from the United States can match an Israeli client with kidney failure to a seller from Ukraine. The surgery will be performed in Turkey. The sale of human organs is against the law in most countries of the world (Iran is an exception), so many of the surgeries are performed elsewhere, in nations where laws are easier to duck.
The rise of life expectancies in developed countries and refinement of transplantation surgery has fueled demand for organs. Demand has also increased in economically beat countries like Ukraine, but most of the country’s organs are believed to be smuggled out. In Ukraine alone, there are 2,000 people requiring a kidney transplant. But only 200 transplantations are performed each year.
