By JIM BRONSKILL, THE CANADIAN PRESS
OTTAWA — Calling it a crime against
humanity, a new report alleges China is harvesting vital organs from devotees
of the outlawed Falun Gong movement.
Hearts, kidneys, livers and corneas
are removed from executed practitioners of Falun Gong and sold for transplant
at hefty prices, sometimes to foreigners, the report says.
Winnipeg human
rights lawyer David Matas and former Liberal cabinet minister David Kilgour, who
undertook a two-month investigation, acknowledged yesterday their findings were
almost too astonishing to comprehend.
"The very horror makes us reel
back in disbelief," the report says. "But that disbelief does not mean
that the allegations are untrue."
At a news conference, Matas called
the practice a shocking "new form of evil" on this planet. "Who
would have believed the Holocaust before it happened?"
Kilgour, former
secretary of state for the Asia-Pacific region, said Canadians are among those
who have travelled to China for illicit organs.
"It’s appalling,"
he said.
COULDN’T OBTAIN VISAS
The pair carried out the probe as
volunteers at the request of the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun
Gong, a Washington-based group with a branch in Ottawa. Falun Gong is an outlawed
sect in China.
Kilgour and Matas were unsuccessful in obtaining visas to
visit China to investigate.
Instead they gathered testimony from witnesses
in the West, consulted the websites of Chinese transplant centres and studied
transcripts of Mandarin conversations with doctors and other officials at hospitals
and detention centres in China.
The report says figures indicate about
60,000 transplants occurred in China from 2000 to 2005. Of these, an estimated
18,500 would have come from legitimate sources, leaving 41,500 unexplained transplants.
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http://torontosun.com/News/Canada/2006/07/07/1672569-sun.html
Posting
date: 7/July/2006
Original article date: 6/July/2006
Category: Media Report