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Four Russian Doctors to be Re-Tried for Organ Stealing

by Hilary White

MOSCOW, April 11, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Four Russian doctors who were arrested in an operating room, are being charged for plotting to kill a patient for the lucrative illegal organ trade. Doctors Irina Lirtsman and Lyubov Pravdenko, of Hospital No. 20, and Bairma Shagdurova and Pyotr Pyatnichuk, of the Moscow Organ Donation Coordination Center, were charged with trying to remove a kidney from an accident victim while he was still alive.

In late March, Russia's Supreme Court overturned a verdict of not guilty against the doctors and sent the case back to Moscow’s city court for a jury trial.

The victim, identified in legal documents as A. Orekhov, had sustained head injuries, including brain and skull damage and the accused doctors had pronounced his case as hopeless. The Russian police say the man died several hours after police arrested the doctors in the operating room.

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) reports that the doctors claimed that Orekhov had subsequently suffered three heart attacks and that he was “clinically dead.” This claim is consistent with recent trends in bioethics that proposes several different versions of “death,” for purposes of organ harvesting. The term “brain death” is being criticized by many ethicists as indefinable and wide open to this kind of abuse.

In Russia, however, the law has not caught up to the ethical debate, and a person must be “biologically dead” before it is legal to remove his organs. The Russian police say that the doctors were trying to remove the injured man’s kidneys while he was unquestionably still alive. They say when they entered the operating theatre, police doctors found his pulse and blood pressure steady.

The case is raising fears that Russian doctors are regularly harvesting organs from live patients for sale. The police told the BMJ that they set up surveillance at the hospital after being tipped off by a woman who complained that a friend had been “cut open” for his organs after an accident.

Previous reports have come out of Russia indicating the practice is widespread. In September 2003, The Courier Mail reported that surgeons were removing kidneys from homeless people illegally while the victim was still alive. One of the surgeons said that in general the donors "are done for anyway, maybe they could live another three or four days."

Last May, the UK’s Observer reported the grisly story of Ukrainian women aborting their children whose body parts were then used in “beauty” treatments. Some of the women reported that they had been duped into thinking their babies were “defective” by doctors eager for the remains. “When a doctor wants a foetus [to sell], he tells a girl there is a medical reason for an abortion later than 12 weeks,” said Sergei Shorobogatko, a Kiev policeman investigating the illegal trade.

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Russian Surgeons Removing Organs Saying Patients Almost Dead Anyways
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2003/sep/03090906.html

Read report from the Observer:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1461654,00.html

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