Organ traffic is 'undeniable'

03/03/2004 11:05 - (SA)

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Lisbon - Clerics in Mozambique have urged President Joaquim Chissano to crack down on human organ trafficking in the country and challenged a government finding that no such crime exists, a paper reported on Tuesday.

"The existence of an organ trafficking ring is undeniable," eight Roman Catholic clerics said in a letter published by the Portuguese daily Diario de Noticias, accusing authorities in the southern African country of indifference.

The alleged traffic was brought to light by missionary nuns in the northern province of Nampula, where they said they had gathered evidence from would-be victims of the network who had managed to escape and had photographs of dead children with missing organs.

"These denunciations were brought to the attention of the episcopal conference in Mozambique, which decided to take the problem straight to President Joaquim Chissano," the letter said.

'No evidence'

Mozambique's assistant attorney general, Rafael Sebastiao, on February 25 said that a preliminary investigation into the allegations had found no evidence that human organs had been removed from bodies and sold.

He said a team of forensic specialists had over two weeks examined 14 cases of violent death or disappearances allegedly linked with the sale of organs but had concluded they were not the work of a trafficking network.

A day later, a Brazilian nun, Doraci Edinger, was found murdered in the town of Nampula. Six people were arrested in connection with her death, Attorney General Joaquim Madeira said, but he declined to comment on a possible link between the killing and the alleged organ trafficking.

Madeira said, however, that there was strong evidence of child trafficking in Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony.

Six children escaped

"We are working with about six children who are said to have escaped from their abductors after going missing for weeks or months," he said.

Several nuns in Nampula have received death threats since the allegations first came out. They said that several attempts have also been made to abduct children from an orphanage they run.

The Mozambican League of Human Rights, which alerted the state prosecutor to alleged organ trafficking last September, has criticised the prosecutor's report as superficial. So has the church, which mentioned Edinger's murder in the letter.