IN the private patient unit of the Royal Free Hospital, London, Sonia Ekweremadu, the 25-year-old daughter of the then deputy president of the Nigerian senate, waited for a kidney donor.
Private organ donation in the UK is limited to immediate blood-tied relatives, but carried a rare gene that ruled out family donors.
To help find a donor, her father Ike, 60, approached physician Obinna Obeta, who sourced *'Daniel', a 21-year-old street vendor from Lagos, , and a UK visa was fast-tracked for him.
Sonia’s father assured the hospital – where 140 private kidney transplants are conducted every year – that Daniel was her cousin and a match.
But a would later hear that a broker, in return for £1,500, had into giving up his kidney.
The operation didn’t go ahead because hospital staff believed he didn’t understand he was going to have an organ removed.
Despite their suspicions, staff did not inform the .
They only got involved after Daniel, fearing Obeta was going to have his kidney removed back in Nigeria instead, ran away and slept on the street until he had the courage to go to the authorities.
The ’s chief investigator Esther Richardson said the donor was “treated as a commodity,”; and called the exchange “a transactional process just like any drugs or firearm deal”;.
Esther said: “Had this been successful, the victim would have had long-term medical implications that may even have had the requirement for .”;
She adds: “He is innocent and naive. Having never been on a flight, he was petrified the plane would fall from the sky.”;
Obeta engaged in to try to brainwash his victim not to escape, which is a common tool in the trafficker’s arsenal, especially in Nigeria where a curse is regularly performed on women being groomed for .
After an investigation, Sonia’s father was arrested, convicted and sentenced to more than nine years in prison for trafficking the street vendor for his kidney.
His , 56, was sentenced to four years and six months in prison. Obeta was convicted for helping traffic the street vendor.
During the trial at the Old Bailey in 2022, the court heard Obeta had earlier received a successful kidney transplant himself at the Royal Free Hospital.
His donor was also a young man he had falsely presented as his cousin. No prosecutions were ever carried forward on that case.
The case against the Ekweremadus was the first of its kind to be successfully tried under the UK’s 2015 Modern Slavery Act, introduced to crack down on organ trafficking and other forms of exploitation.
Daniel, who now lives under police protection in the UK, told investigators he “owed”; Obeta his kidney in exchange for a visa and permit to stay in the UK.
“He [Obeta] did not tell me he brought me here for this reason,”; Daniel said. “He did not tell me anything about this. I would not have agreed. My body is not for sale.”;
Sonia, who was believed to be still awaiting a kidney transplant, was not charged with any crimes as she believed her donor was a relative she had never met before.
Sinister means
Although organ trafficking is rare inside the UK, the global organ trafficking trade was believed to be worth as much as £1.3billion annually.
In the second part of her book, investigative journalist Barbie Latza Nadeau has laid bare the extent of the sale of body parts, banned by the (WHO) in 1987.
Almost 10 per cent of all transplants are from trafficked organs, according to the Global Financial Integrity think tank.
The WHO estimates 10,000 kidneys are traded on the black market a year, averaging more than one illegal kidney transplanted every hour of every day.
There are three categories of organ donors. Firstly, legitimate donors who have joined the NHS’s Organ Donor Register or those who have not “opted out”; from the system, as it stands in the UK, meaning their organs can be used in the event of their death.
The second category is those who are murdered or without consent.
He [Obeta] did not tell me anything about this. I would not have agreed. My body is not for sale.
Daniel
They may be placed under duress, which can include debt bondage or extortion, and forced to sell a kidney or even a cornea, after which they continue living.
In the worst cases, they may be killed for vital organs like their lungs, heart or pancreas, which are sold to desperately sick buyers for large sums of money.
The third category is a living person who knowingly consents to sell an organ like a kidney for financial gain. This can be done illicitly on the black market, or legitimately, for example, to help a loved one.
“Organ trafficking may be facilitated by corrupt officials or criminal groups and may include brokers or other middlemen who connect individuals providing the organ with prospective recipients, negotiate the price, and identify medical facilities where the transplant can occur,”; a 2021 report to US Congress said.
In 2023, the crime data-gathering group Havocscope, which keeps a tally on the black market in organ prices based on open-source information, including police reports and the dark web, listed the average global price paid to a kidney seller as £3,800, enough to support a family for several years in some developing nations.
The buyer, however, pays on average £116,100, depending on the country.
Brokers in places where organ trafficking is more prevalent, like the Philippines, make no more than £1,160 a kidney, while in places where the trade is less transparent, like Yemen, they can make up to £46,400.
Someone in China will pay around £36,700 for a kidney, while a transplant tourist in Israel will pay around £9,700.
Vital organs, which require a deceased donor, are naturally more expensive. A lung goes for about £242,000 in Europe, the group found.
For those in the organ trafficking business, the real money being made is in the US and countries that do not have the protective layer of a national public healthcare system.
In the US, kidneys sell for around £193,400 on the black market, skin around £8 an inch and a heart can fetch £774,000, according to the Medical Futurist.
In countries where national healthcare systems exist, private patients with the right connections can expect to pay £23,000 for a cornea, £116,000 for a set of lungs, £100,000 for a heart and £76,000 for a liver.
Eyes sold on WhatsApp
In 2020, one organ broker in Beirut admitted selling 30 kidneys a year, harvested from the residents of refugee camps and once bought an eye from a desperate donor.
The deal was done over WhatsApp and even included a photo of the eye to see if the buyer liked the colour.
There are hundreds of thousands of people on kidney transplant waiting lists worldwide, with the average wait in the UK between two to three years, and kidneys are available for only around one-third.
Mortality rates on waiting lists are high, between 15 and 30 per cent, depending on location – factors that allow for the exploitation of desperate people.
As well as backstreet clinics, organs are harvested in private clinics like that in London’s Royal Free Hospital and similar settings all over the world.
Intensive medical expertise is required not only to remove organs but to keep them in a fit state for transplantation.
Human organs have a short shelf life outside the body. Kidneys, if kept properly, can remain viable for up to 36 hours after removal and the donor can go on to live a normal life.
Things become murkier when organs like the heart are involved. The suggestion that people are murdered for their organs implies an unthinkable complicity by medical doctors and hospitals.
But a transplant doctor in Italy, who preferred to remain anonymous, insists that it is not the surgeon’s duty to vet the organs they are presented with.
In cases of car accidents, for example, the doctor will be told a vital organ is available while a specialist team keeps the donor alive on life support.
The donor is then taken off life support, usually in accordance with family wishes or living wills.
Iran remains the only country in the world where buying and selling organs is legal for its citizens.
All other countries have banned the practice, at least on paper, but some countries, including China, have been accused by the group Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting of executing prisoners to harvest organs for their large population.
Globally, the demand for organs is high and getting higher because of the increase in cancer, chronic kidney disease and cardiovascular diseases, especially in developed nations.
In 2022, 157,494 transplants were carried out and WHO estimates that ten per cent of those used trafficked organs – meaning 15,749 organs came from people who either sold them illegally or were killed for them.
Organs are also trafficked on the battlefield, where prisoners of war are killed so their organs can be harvested for dictators and injured soldiers.
Battlefield organ trafficking was a common activity in the Syrian civil war and has been documented in Yemen, and most recently, the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the illegal trade in human organs was well established before Russia’s invasion.
*Name has been changed to protect the victim
