Wang Guoqi, a Chinese burn specialist seeking political...

Wang Guoqi, a Chinese burn specialist seeking political asylum in the United States said that as a physician in China, he took part in removing corneas and harvesting skin from more than 100 executed prisoners, including one who had not yet died.
Wang said in a written statement that he also saw other doctors remove vital organs from executed prisoners and that his hospital, the Tianjin Paramilitary Police General Brigade Hospital, sold those organs for enormous profits.
His statement was presented to the International Relations Committee.
Wang Guoqi, 38, said he obtained a passport under a false name for about $550 and entered the United States on April 30 with a tourist group and stayed on rather than returning to China as scheduled on May 14.
Wang's detailed statements include the dates and places of executions, the names of doctors involved in organ removals and graphic descriptions of the medical procedures.According to his statement, the police hospital often was notified in advance of multiple executions. Wang said security officials were paid $37 a corpse to tip off the hospital about executions. Kidneys later were sold to wealthy or high-ranking people for more than $15,000 each, he said.
Wang said he worked at execution grounds and crematoriums, wearing plain clothes rather than a police uniform. In many cases, he said, prisoners were shot, then immediately placed in ambulances, where their kidneys were extracted within two minutes of death.Afterward, he and other doctors went to crematoriums and, in a small room next to the cremation furnaces, carved skin from the arms, legs, chest and back of each corpse. The skin was stored in saline solution at low temperatures to use later on burn victims. He said he also extracted corneas and other tissue. "After all extractable tissues and organs were taken, what remained was an ugly heap of muscles, the blood vessels still bleeding, or all viscera exposed," he said. "Then the corpse was handed to the workers at the crematorium."
Wang said his conscience has been "tortured" since an October 1995 incident in Hebei Province, where he and other doctors arrived for the execution of a man sentenced to death for robbery and murder. Before the execution, Wang administered an injection of heparin to prevent blood clotting. A policeman told the prisoner it was a tranquilizer.An executioner then shot the prisoner, but the bullet did not immediately kill him, and he lay on the ground convulsing, Wang said. Nevertheless, the doctors were ordered to take him to the ambulance, where urologists extracted his kidneys. Wang and other burn surgeons remained inside the ambulance to harvest the skin. Then they threw the half-dead prisoner in a plastic bag on a flatbed truck and left, he said."Whatever impact I have made in the lives of burn victims and transplant patients does not excuse the unethical and immoral manner of extracting organs," Wang wrote.