A GANG that profited from trading organs labeled human kidneys as seafood while trafficking them, Beijing News said yesterday as it revealed details of the gang’s operations, which led to 12 members being sentenced to jail in Jiangxi Province last month.

    The kidneys were stored in a refrigerated container before being flown from Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi, to Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province. One gang member, Mo Yongqing, said airport security staff were told it was frozen seafood, a lie he said worked every time.

    The gang, which made more than 1.5 million yuan (US$243,600) between October 2011 and February 2012, recruited nearly 40 potential “donors” online, with 23 of them having one of their kidneys removed, the report said.

    One “donor,” a 21-year-old from Anhui Province, told the newspaper he wanted to earn some money to show his father he could live on his own.

    He saw an advertisement online and went to Nanchang in October 2011.

    Before the transplant, he stayed in a motel guarded by gang members and was taken to two hospitals to see if he was a match with patients needing transplants.

    About three weeks later, he was blindfolded and taken to a hospital to have a kidney removed, for which he was paid 25,000 yuan.

    Most of the donors were in their 20s and 30s, and earned between 22,000 and 25,000 yuan, the newspaper said.

    The gang paid the privately owned Nanchang Huazhong Hospital 35,000 yuan to rent a room for each operation, the newspaper said.

    The hospital has since been closed down. The newspaper said many of the gang members had previously sold organs or had been transplant patients.

    Jiang Zhenglin, a doctor, earned 10,000 yuan for each operation. Nurses “borrowed” from other hospitals were each paid up to 4,000 yuan.

    (SD-Agencies)