Pakistan’s illegal organ trade crosses borders, driven by poverty and weak oversight: Report

Islamabad: Pakistan’s illegal organ trade has evolved into a cross-border criminal network catering to international demand, exposing the country’s poverty, weak regulation and alleged medical malpractice, a report said.

A recent case in Islamabad involving the alleged export of human placenta to Vietnam has underlined the transnational nature of the trade. Earlier instances of transplant tourism had also pointed to foreign patients travelling to Pakistan to obtain organs through unlawful arrangements, according to a report published in the Pakistan Observer.

The report said the cross-border operations involve local facilitators, foreign recipients, cash transactions and forged medical documents. Such networks expand across jurisdictions and become increasingly difficult to detect when oversight mechanisms are weak.

“Pakistan’s current problem is therefore not the absence of headline arrests. It is the lack of durable suppression after each raid,” the report stated.

It said recent raids suggested that the illegal trade remained entrenched through neighbourhood-level networks, private clinics and poorly regulated facilities. Investigators have reportedly linked the operations to brokers, doctors and other facilitators, with transplant procedures allegedly carried out using forged documents, bypassed approvals and concealed financial arrangements.

In June, Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) Anti-Corruption Circle arrested two suspected recruiters accused of luring brick kiln workers, daily-wage labourers and other economically vulnerable people into illegal kidney transplant procedures.

The arrests followed an earlier operation in Islamabad in which a doctor and several members of his medical team were taken into custody.

Officials alleged that the network may have facilitated about 187 illegal kidney transplants. Recipients were reportedly charged between PKR 6 million and PKR 10 million — around $21,500 to $36,000 — for each procedure, while donors received only a small share of the money.

The report said the figures highlighted the unequal nature of the trade, in which financially vulnerable people risk their health while middlemen and medical operators allegedly make substantial profits.

In another operation on June 25, the FIA arrested five people in Islamabad, including three Chinese nationals and two Pakistanis, over their alleged involvement in illegal human-organ trafficking.

Investigators recovered fresh, dried and processed human placenta during the raid. The material was suspected to have been sourced from hospitals in Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Lahore.

According to officials, the placenta was allegedly falsely labelled as sheep organs and shipped overseas, with Vietnam identified as the destination. The report said the case demonstrated that the illegal trade extended beyond kidney trafficking and transplant scams to the collection, processing and export of human biological material through hospital-linked channels.

(Inputs from IANS)