Far Eastern Economic Review, 6 Jan 2009, Geoffrey Cain
After a stranger approached him for a job, Mohammad Salim told India’s NDTV Television he was escorted into a dark, paint-chipped room with gunmen who gave him an injection. He fainted and woke up with a pain in his side, a doctor standing over him. His kidney had been removed. The group paid him 50,000 rupees ($1,045) for the organ, but the crippling pain meant he was out of work—and in debt—for months.
That doctor, Amit Kumar, has since been arrested following a global manhunt, but the dark underworld of organ trafficking remains a big business in Asia. Kidneys around the continent fetch for between $25,000 and $60,000, and lungs and hearts are over $150,000. Yet unlike human or drug trafficking operations run by shady criminal warlords, organ trafficking operations are run by well-connected doctors in Chennai, Manila and Islamabad, and sophisticated middlemen who frequent the slums in those cities.
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