SANAA: Police have arrested a Yemeni suspected of involvement in organ trafficking, a phenomenon which has lured 200 victims in the poor Arab country, the interior ministry said on Friday.
The ministry said on its website that the suspect, named as M.M.A. Al-Moussaghari, 26, had confessed to having become a trafficker after he himself had sold one of his kidneys to a hospital in Egypt last year.
He had "persuaded a number of Yemenis to sell their organs, taking a commission," it said, adding that some 200 Yemenis had sold organs, mostly kidneys but also corneas, for between $5,000 and $7,000 each.
In April, a judicial source said Yemen’s public prosecutor was questioning six of 12 people — Yemenis, Egyptians and Jordanians — suspected of belonging to an international gang accused of organ trafficking.
An investigation has uncovered the involvement of "a doctor who works in one of the most prominent hospitals in Egypt," according to the source.
The mediator between the Yemeni victims who sold their kidneys, and members of the trafficking network, was paid commissions of up to $60,000 per kidney, the source said.
But those who sold their organs were paid only $5,000, of which they were sometimes robbed on their way back to Yemen.
A Jordanian suspect, Ramzi Khalil Abdullah Farah, was arrested at Sanaa airport on March 23 while attempting to travel to Egypt along with seven Yemenis who were going to sell their kidneys, a security source said.
The World Health Organisation considers Egypt, where hundreds of poor people sell kidneys or parts of their livers every year, to be a centre for organ trafficking.
At the end of February, the Egyptian parliament adopted a law to regulate organ transplants and limit trafficking. –AFP
