Kyle Swenson // ‘A cruel harvest of the poor’: Israeli allegedly behind human organ black market arrested in Cyprus - The Washington Post

23.1.18

‘A cruel harvest of the poor’: Israeli allegedly behind human organ black market arrested in Cyprus - The Washington Post: Altun told police he had donated the organ at a clinic called Medicus on the city’s outskirts. A broker in Istanbul had offered Altun a generous sum for the kidney. He would later recount lying in the same room as the man — a 74-year-old Israeli — who had paid about $145,000 for his organ, the Guardian reported in 2010. The two men, donor and recipient, locked eyes before the anesthetic kicked in.

The young man’s collapse was the first domino to go in a complex investigation into an international organ black market operating out of the Balkan country. Desperate donors, mostly from Turkey and the former Soviet Union, provided the organs. Buyers, many from Israel, paid between 80,000 and 100,000 euros ($96,000 and $120,000) for the kidneys. International prosecutors would later determine at least 23 people had their organs removed at Medicus in an eight-month run in 2008.