Sixteen people have been charged with organising the sale of 51 human kidneys for more than 10 million yuan (HK$12.3 million) in the mainland's biggest organ trading case.
The suspects include agents who solicited donors in online chat rooms and doctors and nurses in Anhui and Jiangsu who went to Beijing to harvest kidneys, the Procuratorate Daily's jcrb.com website quoted unnamed prosecutors from Beijing's Haidian district as saying.
Mainland law allows organ donations from the living only when the donor is a close relative or intimate partner of the recipient.
But a chronic shortage of donor organs has spawned an underground trade, with some people forging identity papers to bypass the law.
Last Thursday, a 28-year-old migrant worker in Dongguan claimed he woke up to find himself 20,000 yuan richer but missing one kidney. He confessed to his father on Tuesday that he had actually sold it voluntarily, cqnews.net reports. His case is not related to the Beijing case.
Zheng Wei, who charged 10,000 yuan to introduce donors to patients, started organising the Beijing trade in early 2010 by paying doctors at county-level hospitals to harvest organs and then selling them.
