China Harvested Its Prisoners' Hearts While They Were Alive, Study Finds

A new Australian research has unveiled the grim reality behind China's organ harvesting trade involving its death row inmates.

According to the study, Chinese surgeons harvest the prisoners' organ while they are still alive.

The study by the Australian National University (ANU) examined thousands of medical papers from China, which suggested the prisoners were not brain dead when their hearts were removed for transplant. The study published in the American Journal of Transplantation stated the surgeons were enlisted by the state to kill prisoners using organ transplant surgery.

Human rights activists said the evidence "tells a terrible tale of murder and mutilation in China" and the stories coming out of the country are "almost too dreadful to believe," Sky News reported.

The study, which involved 71 cases, was conducted by ANU PhD researcher Matthew Robertson and Israeli cardiac transplant surgeon Jacob Lavee. Both said the doctors played an "active role" in the process.

"In these cases, the removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the proximate cause of the donor's death," Robertson said. "Because these organ donors could have only been prisoners, our finding strongly suggest that physicians in the People's Republic of China have participated in executions by organ removal."

Robertson said the surgeries were conducted on death row inmates and on “prisoners of conscience” – some of them were believed to be political prisoners or ethnic Uighurs.

While researchers found 71 suspected heart-removal deaths in 56 hospitals, they believe the numbers could be much higher. The timeline of the organ harvesting has not been revealed.

“While we don’t know exactly how these prisoners end up on the operating table, we can speculate there are multiple troubling scenarios as to how this happens,” Robertson said, according to The Australian Financial Review. “These include a bullet to the prisoner’s head before being immediately rushed to hospital, or a drug injection that paralyses the prisoner.”

China has repeatedly denied allegations of organ harvesting from prisoners, but researchers claim the practice has been going on for more than three decades. It is also likely other organs such as livers and kidneys have also been removed.