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“Kosovo chief tied to grisly gang/Serb prisoners of war were killed for kidneys, European report finds,” read the headline of The New York Times on December 16, 2010. The Times article describes the common practice of extracting kidneys from Serbian prisoners executed during the Kosovo conflict in 1999. Military detention facilities were converted to makeshift hospitals to remove the organs and to smuggle them out of Albania to be sold in private overseas clinics. “Initially,” the report says, “the captives were Serbian prisoners, but the ring also kidnapped ethnic Albanians to settle old scores (p. 1). Captives were “filtered” for their suitability, based on sex, age, health conditions, and ethnic origins. We heard numerous references to captives not merely having been handed over, but also having been “bought” and “sold.” The final destination was a two-story farmhouse in Fushe Kruje in the west of Albania, which was close to the airport hub serving Tirana and where the “filtering” and “blood testing” took place. Some of the guards told investigators that a few captives figured out their fate and “pleaded with their captors to be spared the fate of being chopped into pieces” (p. 3)
What is organ-legging, also called organ harvesting? Google describes it this way:
Organ harvesting refers to the removal, preservation and use of human organs and tissue from the bodies of the recently deceased to be used in surgical transplants on the living. Though mired in ethical debate and heavily regulated, organ donation in the United States has largely become an accepted medical practice.
Historically there has been contention about the legality and morality regarding organ harvesting. One of the earliest recorded examples of organ theft are the Burke and Hare murders in Edinburgh in 1828 (Rossner, 2009, p. 8), where the victims bodies were to be used as cadavers in medical schools and the copycat London Burkers (“body snatchers”) in 1831. The modern view of organ harvesting is du