The Court of Valencia has condemned a wealthy Lebanese and his son, as well as a group of collaborators, for buying a liver to save the life of the millionaire, according to the newspaper Las Provincias. The Chamber imposes eight months in prison for the transplanted Hatem Akkouche, and a year and a half for his son, and three and a half years for the collaborators for the crimes of promoting, favoring or facilitating illegal transplantation of human organs. This is the first case tried in Spain of an organ trafficking network.
The trial was held at the end of last year. The Lebanese was accused of buying a piece of healthy liver in 2013, taking advantage of the precarious economic situation of people without resources, and acknowledged yesterday in court that given his liver disease, the only way to save his life was to receive a transplant. The investigations concluded that a woman was offered 40,000 euros and they even carried out compatibility tests on eight people. In total, they contacted eight candidates, all people with a difficult economic situation.
The liver patient, a mayor of a Lebanese city, contacted two of his nephews who lived in Spain and ran a company in Novelda so that they could find a living donor, “knowing the prestige of this surgery in our country,” according to the Prosecutor’s Office in his indictment.
Both the nephews and the son of the patient and another Lebanese compatriot then began the negotiations for “the materialization of said transplant, with an evident breach of Spanish legislation regarding inter vivo organ donation,” added the public prosecution. Thus, they contacted eight candidates, people who were “especially vulnerable both because of their origin and because of their economic hardship.
Several of them came to pay for the tests in different medical clinics in Spain to find out their compatibility as donors with the patient, some of them estimated at more than 12.00 euros. And in many cases, always according to the Prosecutor’s version, they were offered money or work, among other perks, in exchange for the donation. This was not carried out because the candidates did not want to take the risk or were not admitted by the doctors, among other reasons. Finally it was the millionaire’s son who donated a piece of liver.
