China yesterday strongly rejected allegations from a doctor that he had harvested organs from executed Chinese prisoners, including one who was still alive.
In a highly unusual move, Chinese officials organised a press conference to hit back at the allegations made by Dr Wang Guoqi to a US Congress human rights committee last week. They said the doctor's claims were lies and that he had cheated patients, lied about his qualifications and fabricated his story to seek political asylum.
Officials presented evidence which they claimed disproved Dr Wang's testimony that doctors extracted organs from inmates immediately after execution at Tianjin Police General Division hospital to sell to foreign transplant patients.
However, officials from the hospital and from the Tianjin Foreign Ministry refused to answer questions about how many prisoners voluntarily donated organs, which hospitals supervised organ removals in such cases or why relatives of the executed prisoners were often not allowed to see corpses before they were cremated.
Reports of organ-harvesting in China have surfaced several times in the past decade, but Dr Wang's testimony last week was the most graphic to date and came at a sensitive time for Beijing with the decision on the host city for the 2008 Olympics due on July 13th.
Dr Wang claimed he had removed the skin and corneas from the corpses of more than 100 executed prisoners, including some victims of intentionally botched executions. He is seeking asylum in the US.
But the hospital's deputy chief, Mr Tian Fuming, told the news conference that Dr Wang only had an elementary professional qualification and did not have the skills or the power to take part in human organ transplant operations.
The hospital had neither the expertise nor the equipment to perform organ transplants, although it did perform skin grafts for burn victims, Mr Tian said.
Mr Tian said Dr Wang had once been reprimanded officially for cheating patients by selling them medicine given to him free by the hospital.