Thursday February 1, 3:10 AM  

*Red Army, Canadians involved in 'bloody harvest' of body parts*

China's military is reportedly harvesting organs from unwilling live
prison inmates, mostly Falungong practitioners, for transplants on a
large scale, including to foreign recipients, a study said.

The report's authors -- Canada's former secretary of state for the Asia
Pacific region, David Kilgour, and human rights lawyer David Matas --
had implicated dozens of hospitals and jails throughout China in July,
after a two-month investigation.

Chinese officials denied those allegations.

Matas and Kilgour's second report, released Wednesday, includes
interviews with organ recipients in 30 countries and Canadian hospital
staff who subsequently cared for more than 100 patients who had
undergone suspicious transplant surgeries in China.

"The involvement of the People's Liberation Army in these transplants is
widespread," Kilgour said at a press conference.

Like many civilian hospitals in rural China, military hospitals turned
to selling organs to make up for government funding cuts in the 1980s,
the report stated.

But military personnel could operate with much more secrecy, it said.

"Recipients often tell us that even when they receive transplants at
civilian hospitals, those conducting the operation are military
personnel," the report said.

Hospitals in Canada's biggest cities, Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto,
meanwhile, confirmed that "a substantial number" of Canadians had
traveled to China for dubious organ transplants, Kilgour said.

"We're in the three digits, up over 100 (from Canada each year), and the
trend is accelerating," Matas said.

To curb what they called a "disgusting form of evil," the pair asked
pharmaceutical firms to stop selling organ anti-rejection drugs to China.

They also asked countries to post travel advisories warning about
China's alleged organ harvest, asked states to cease offering follow-up
care for patients who had dubious organ transplants in China and asked
foreign doctors to cut ties with their Chinese counterparts suspected of
such practices.

In addition, the authors said states should enact legislation to ban
citizens from traveling to China for organ transplants from unwilling
donors, although they admitted that such cases would be difficult to
prosecute.