The investigation included convicted prisoners placed on death row.
One study says Chinese surgeons removed the hearts of prisoners when they were still alive, in a despicable organ harvesting technique.
Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) reviewed thousands of Chinese medical documents and concluded that surgeons killed prisoners during operations.
The authors say their computer models refute Chinese claims that all prisoners are brain dead before their organs are harvested, The Times reports.
The study, published in the American Journal of Transplantation, states that some prisoners are still alive, although not necessarily consciouson the operating table, which violates international medical guidelines.
Surgeons rushed live transplants.
The research was led by Matthew Robertson, a political student, and Jacob Lavee, a cardiac surgeon and professor at Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine.
Robertson said: “We discovered that doctors had become executioners in the name of the State and that the method of execution is removal of the heart. These surgeries are very profitable for the doctors and hospitals that perform them. “
The authors discarded 2,838 documents on transplant procedures in China between 1980 and 2020 and found that brain death was not properly established prior to organ harvesting in 71 cases.
“If the reports we reviewed are accurate, they indicate that the surgeon’s harvest of the heart and lungs was the near-cause of the inmate’s death, which directly involves the surgeon in execution,” the researchers note.
The complaint substantiated at least 71 cases of possible homicides.
And they fear that the real number may be higher because uncertain results have been omitted from reporting. The authors stated that the documents did not directly identify the donors as prisoners, but it is clear that very few voluntary donations are made in China.
China promised to overhaul its transplant system in 2007 and vowed to end the practice of extracting organs from executed prisoners in 2015.
Robertson said surgeons operated on death row prisoners and “prisoners of conscience,” which may include political prisoners and the persecuted Uyghur minority.
“While we don’t know exactly how these prisoners end up at the trading desk, we can imagine that there are many disturbing situations of how this happens,” he told the Australian Financial Review.
“Among them, a bullet to the inmate’s head before being immediately transferred to the hospital or a drug injection that paralyzed him.”
Source: Clarin