Nigerian Ex-Senate Chief Guilty of Organ Harvesting - UK Court

Nigeria's former senate president Ike Ekweremadu, 60, his wife Beatrice, 56, and a medical doctor Obinna Obeta, 51, have been found guility in the Old Bailey in London, of organ harvesting, Vanguard reports. It is the first verdict of its kind under the Modern Slavery Act.

Premium Times reported that the prosecutors said the Ekweremadu's were being charged for bringing a 15-year-old boy from Nigeria to the UK with the claim that he was to be given a better life there when in actuallity was brought to harvest his kidney for their sick daughter. The donor's age was in dispute but a British magistrate's court found that he was 21 years old.

Prosecutor Hugh Davies KC said: "What he agreed to do was not simply expedient in the clinical interests of his daughter, Sonia, it was exploitation, it was criminal. It is no defence to say he acted out of love for his daughter. Her clinical needs cannot come at the expense of the exploitation of somebody in poverty."

Ekweremadu's daughter did not testify.

This article originally appeared on AllAfrica.

Image via Punch Newspapers.