Israeli Wanted By Interpol Arrested For Running Organ Harvesting Ring
Moshe Harel, in an undated photograph, and the Medicus clinic in Kosovo where kidneys were harvested. Image by Getty/Facebook/Forward Montage
By Ari Feldman January 8, 2018
An Israeli national was arrested in Cyprus last week for his alleged involvement in an international human organ harvesting and trafficking ring, the Washington Post reported..
Moshe Harel, wanted by Interpol and Russian authorities for human trafficking since 2010, was allegedly one of the orchestrators of an organ trafficking ring run from a clinic in Kosovo called Medicus. While judges jailed Yusuf Ercin Sonmez, a Turkish doctor, in 2013 for being the main surgeon, Harel was determined to have been the “fixer.”
According to court documents, the clinic often paid young, poor Turkish men for one of their kidneys, paying them upwards of $10,000. Clients seeking organ transplants — from Israel, Germany and Canada, among other places — might pay as much as $150,000 for the operation.
“Medicus was one of a constellation of clinics operated by Sonmez, Harel and others,” Jonathan Ratel, the lead prosecutor, said in 2013. “We found clinics in Azerbaijan and other places and we believe there may be one in South Africa.”
“This was a cruel harvest of the poor,” Ratel added.
Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
