Taipei: Taiwan’s Falungong spiritual sect Monday accused China of running a Nazi concentration camp-style facility to harvest organs from their members and sell the organs to patients who need transplants.
The sect, citing information from a Chinese doctor, now living in the US, claimed that a hospital in Shengyang, in northeast China, has been carrying on the persecution of mainland Falungong members and the illegal organ trade since 2001.
“Since 2001, some 6,000 Falungong members have been sent to the Shenyang Thrombosis Hospital and only 2,000 of them are alive,” Taiwan Falungong leader Chang Ching-hsi quoted the doctor as saying.
“The other Falungong members died after their kidney, liver, cornea or skin were removed,” he added.
Ching-hsi said the doctor quit his job and immigrated to the US as he had nightmares after removing organs from Falungong members who were still alive.
According to the anonymous doctor, the harvesting of Falungong members’ organs was carried out in the hospital’s air-raid shelters and its adjacent compound nicknamed “the backyard”.
Bodies of the Falungong members were cremated in a furnace, he stated.
There is no official confirmation of the human-organ trade allegations, but the doctor, judging by the sudden increase in the hospital’s purchase of medical supplies, estimated that 6,000 Falungong members had entered the hospital since 2001.
Falungong, which literally means “Law of the Wheel”, is a spiritual group, which combines medication and exercise and preaches truth, compassion and endurance. China banned it in 2001 after thousands of members demonstrated in about 30 Chinese cities against the arrest of several of their leaders.
The movement has now spread all over the world with millions of followers.
The Falungong group issued an open letter to US President George W Bush, asking him to raise the issue of China harvesting organs from Falungong members with Chinese President Hu Jintao, when he visits the US next month.
Several Chinese hospitals are known to use organs harvested from executed prisoners to transplant into foreign and overseas Chinese patients.
These hospitals advertise organ-transplant service on the Internet but do not reveal the source of human organs.
China has banned the sale of human organs, but has turned a blind to the illegal human-organ trade using organs from executed prisoners because Beijing believes the transplants can advance China’s medical science, Taiwanese press reports said.