Organ Harvesting, Human Trafficking, and the Black Market

 

 Fifty years ago, the abomination of slavery seemed like a thing of the past. But history has a way of repeating itself. Today, we find that human slavery is once again a sickening reality. At this moment, men, women and children are being trafficked and exploited all over the world: 2.4 million have been trafficked into forced labour worldwide of these, 600,000 to 800,000 are trafficked across borders each year and 12,000 children are working as slaves on cocoa plantations in West Africa. It is impossible to ever reach a consensus on the true scale of the problem but, regardless of the figures, what matters is that human trafficking is big and getting bigger.

What matters is that every number represents a human life destroyed. It is happening on every continent and in almost every country: whether the place we live is a source, destination or transit point for trafficking, none of us can claim to be wholly unaffected by this crime.

In criminal law, kidnapping is the unlawful transportation, asportation and confinement of a person against their will. It can also be defined as false imprisonment by means of abduction, both of which are separate crimes that when committed simultaneously upon the same person merge as the single crime of kidnapping.

The asportation/abduction element is typically but not necessarily conducted by means of force or fear. That is, the perpetrator may use a weapon to force the victim into a vehicle, but it is still kidnapping if the victim is enticed to enter the vehicle willingly (e.g. in the belief that it is a taxi).

Kidnapping may be done to demand for ransom in exchange for releasing the victim, or for other illegal purposes. Kidnapping can also be accompanied by bodily or psychological injury which elevates the crime to aggravated kidnapping.

A new form of this crime called is gradually rising to the fore in the united states, with its operational center in California where victims are heavily sedated by drugs before their abduction. Also more scary is the fact that a lot of the perpetrators are infact Nigerians. The victim catalog is now also beginning to include Nigerians both home and abroad.

In October of 2020, a Newport Beach pot dealer in California was sentenced to life in prison for the kidnapping and mutilation of a Southern California marijuana dispensary owner who was found in the Mojave Desert after a harrowing abduction.

Hossain Nayeri, who gained fame by staging a daring escape from the Orange County jail while awaiting trial, was sentenced to two consecutive life-without-parole prison terms for the brutal kidnapping and torture.

One thing we are not sure about is if this cartel is operated by the same Nigerian organ harvesting cartel that sells human organs as simple as other wares in the Anambra market but with the expertise of surgeons and anesthesiologists.

When families or individuals are tired of spending years on a medical waiting list, they sometimes purchase body parts – kidneys, eyes, lungs, heart, limbs and more – for transplant on the black market. This and many more are the driving forces behind the growing human traficking and organ harvesting.

It sounds like science fiction, but organ harvesting is an unfortunate fact in the criminology world of today. It is a criminal offense to traffic body parts, or perform transplants from any source not legally affiliated with a hospital or other medical facility, but legality doesn’t deter either side of these transactions.

Notably, quite a lot of illegally-trafficked body parts are harvested by any means necessary, and are gladly received, no-questions-asked, by the person willing to pay top dollar for a kidney, a heart, or a hip.

According to the UN Gift Hub, organ trafficking falls into three categories:

(1) Traffickers who trick the victim into giving up an organ for no cost.

(2) Con artists who convince victims to sell their organs, but who do not pay or who pay less than they agreed to pay

(3) Doctors who treat people for ailments which may or may not exist, and remove the organs without the victim’s knowledge

The organ trafficking trade involves a host of offenders. As the UN Gift noted, there is a recruiter who seeks out the ‘donor,’ there is a transporter of the organs, there are staff of the hospital or clinic that receives the organs, and of course the medical practitioners who perform the transplants. There are also middlemen, contractors, buyers and the banks that store the organs/tissue

Just this week a missing little girl was found alive, with her throat slit, and dumped in a soak away pit not far from her parent’s home after she went missing for days. She had ben abducted by a carpenter who lived right behind her parent’s hom

Gradually tipping it over the edge as these criminals throw cautin to the wind as the victims are now closer home as family and friends are not spared.

Source: warridigest