A Ukrainian woman who was convicted for selling 52 kidneys which were illegally harvested has been detained by Polish police.
The woman (35), who was identified by Polish authorities as Ksenia P., has been “wanted since November 9, 2020, to serve a 12-year prison sentence imposed by the Court in Kazakhstan for the crime of participating in an organized criminal group trading in human organs.”
The specifics of her conviction secured in Kazakhstan were that she participated “in an international organized criminal group that was involved in illegally taking tissue and organs human victims for sale on the “black market” from 2017 to 2019, as well as illegally obtaining human organs in the form of kidneys from 56 victims in Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Thailand,
Polish government authorities said in a statement that the woman “was detained in Przemyśl on the basis of an Interpol red notice.”
She was detained on the 6th of March last during a check at the railway crossing in Przemyśl where she was detained by BiOSG officers.
Polish authorities said that on the 7th of March last, the District Prosecutor’s Office in Przemyśl, after questioning the detainee, submitted a motion to the District Court to apply for temporary arrest for a period of 7 days from the date of arrest, for the purpose of extradition.
The UN states that organ traffickers “typically operate within complex and elusive global networks, requiring a sophisticated infrastructure involving medical specialists, logistical coordination and access to healthcare facilities.”
It said traffickers “connect with their victims using local advertisements, social media or via direct approaches by recruiters, who may be former victims themselves or trusted individuals within the victim’s community.”
It described the criminal networks involved as “highly organized and flexible, often functioning as mobile units or specialized groups” adding that “key players include brokers who coordinate logistics, recruit medical professionals, and prepare fraudulent documents.”
In 2015 Czech MEP, Kateřina Konečná, submitted a question for written answer to the European Parliament to seek clarity on claims that wide scale organ harvesting was taking place in Ukraine.
Konečná claimed that she had received information that “teams of specialists” had been “launched at the eastern front and behind the lines to harvest human organs for transplantation which — as was the case in Kosovo previously — are taking organs not only from dead soldiers, but also from those who are seriously, or only slightly, wounded, and according to some sources even from civilians.”
She went on to state that the information she had received claimed that the organs were being “harvested and then sold for cash” however the EU Commission responded that it was “not aware of any reliable reports on alleged cases of harvesting and trade in human organs in Ukraine.”
The UN says that victims of organ harvesting are often “from poor, uneducated and vulnerable backgrounds” and that “unemployed individuals, migrants, asylum seekers and refugees” are typical targets with many being “coerced”, “deceived” or seeing organ selling as a “last resort to improve their dire situations”.