Five Israelis charged with organ trafficking

[Al-khiyal]

Five Israelis charged with organ trafficking

April 22, 2010 -- Israel has charged five of its citizens, including a retired army general, with operating a nationwide organ trafficking ring that ensnared dozens of potential victims. The charges include human trafficking for the purpose of organ harvesting and money laundering. The indictment says that the ring exploited the desperate condition of sick people and called it a "form of modern slavery." The traffickers allegedly offered up to $100,000 per kidney but in at least two cases did not pay the donors, who were sought through advertisements and then flown from Israel to Europe, South America or Southeast Asia, where the organs were extracted in illegal procedures. Israeli law bans organ sales.

[Al-khiyal]

Organ-trafficking suspects indicted

April 22, 2010 -- A harsh indictment was filed against 62-year old Brigadier-General (res.) Meir Zamir from Rishon Lezion, who is suspected of heading a gang of organ traffickers that raked in millions of shekels. Also charged, along with Zamir, who received a gallantry medal during the Yom Kippur War, were brothers Michael and Yaakov Golob, age 40 and 34, Shlomi Biton, 31, and Netanel Moyal, 34. The indictment includes 10 counts underlining various instances of organ harvesting by Zamir and his associates in exchange for payments that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars, despite the fact that they would charge some $100,000 from patients receiving the organ transplant.

The gang would allegedly set up associations to fund the operations and cover up its activity. Some of the money collected by the associations was used to cover the costs of operations abroad, but most of the money made its way to the defendants' pockets. According to the indictment, the gang also created false documentation of alleged family relations between the patients and the donors and drew up false affidavits according to which the kidney "donors" gave their consent to a donation of their free will without any monetary compensation. The indictment said that a false pretense was presented in order to fraudulently receive the authorization of foreign committees responsible for the execution of organ transplants.

"This affair is testament of the shameful phenomenon of modern slavery in the form of 21st century human trafficking. The ugliness of this affair lies in its trampling of the core of humanity by turning human beings into objects that are enslaved to fulfill the needs of others. The defendants operated in an organized, systematic and ongoing manner, and traded in human beings like they were objects being passed from hand to hand, for the sake of harvesting their kidneys," wrote Attorney Bassem Kandalaft of the Northern District Prosecution in the indictment. "They succeeded in executing their plot by exploiting, for their own profit, the economic and social distress of their victims."

Some 10 day ago, two more suspects were arrested in the affair, a 54-year-old insurance agent from Herzliya and a 39-year-old businessman from Tavor.