A heinous crime preying on an economic underclass is growing worldwide: organ trafficking. Make no mistake, organ trafficking is a crime of economic circumstance, stripping the body parts of victims, all of whom are economically underprivileged, in order to sell them for organ transplants to affluent people who can afford expensive life-saving surgery. In some cases, like the recent sentencing of 37 medical professionals in Egypt, the victims are willing participants in clandestine medical laboratories, frequently selling a kidney to overcome financial hardship. However, in Sri Lanka, this gruesome crime is being perpetrated against unsuspecting victims; at an alarming rate it is being done to migrant workers who are being lured to the Middle East.

The plight of domestic foreign workers in Sri Lanka is well documented, with many statistics on the abuses they endure in the Middle East, ranging from contract scams to sexual abuse and murder. With over 25% of the population in Sri Lanka dependent on the foreign workers program with countries in the Middle East, out of the some 1.9 million people working overseas, most are women working as domestic servants often in modern day “slave contracts.” The dark secret underneath these human rights abuses of foreign workers from Sri Lanka is the number of dead bodies returned every year to their loving families. Every year, about 200 to 300 bodies are returned to Sri Lanka; 222 bodies were recorded as being returned in 2018. According to a UNHR-OCHR conference on September 2, 2016:

The Special Rapporteur on the rights of migrants had recommended in his report that Sri Lanka should undertake systematic and independent autopsies of bodies of migrants who died abroad, many of which were mutilated and lacked organs.

This information was not widely publicized; in fact, this issue was buried deep in the conference material, and the focus of the conference was on reforming the foreign workers program in Sri Lanka. Reports indicate that out of the estimated 200 to 300 bodies recovered from the Middle East every year, an alarming percentage are found missing organs; this is the work of the illegal organ trafficking trade.

The earliest known publicized account of this sinister trade in the Middle East comes from a 41-year-old victim, Somalatha Satharasinghe from the Ampara district, whose mutilated body was returned to her family inside a coffin months after serving only a few weeks of her work contract as a domestic helper in Kuwait from May to July 12, 2002.

The horrific story is outlined in a valuable article, “Sri Lankan family alleges woman victim of human organ theft” by Joanne Laurier, August 30, 2002. Much of this article being reprinted here in case it gets scrubbed from the internet, like many of the other articles on this subject:

Ms. Satharasinghe, 41, died in Kuwait and was sent back to her home in Ampara without her kidneys and corneas. According to the Colombo Page, relatives have alleged that she was killed for her organs. Her body was sent back to her family 35 days after her death. Among those demonstrating was Ajith Perera, an immigrant worker who returned from Kuwait last week and has charged that Ms. Satharasinghe, who died under mysterious circumstances, was the victim of the big business-organized trade in human organs. “She had informed the recruitment agency that her employers were forcing her to donate one of her kidneys, but no action was taken. It was a few days later that the agency was informed that she was hospitalized,” Mr. Perera told the Daily Mirror. Somalatha Satharasinghe had gone to Kuwait in May to take up employment as a housemaid. The discovery of her missing organs came after relatives requested a postmortem. The victim’s family was notified on July 10 that Ms. Satharasinghe had been admitted to a Kuwaiti hospital after a sudden fainting spell. She died two days later and on July 28 the family was told that the deceased had donated her kidneys. However L.K. Ruhunuge, the deputy general manager of the FEB, reported to the Sunday Times that after the victim was suddenly taken ill, she went into a coma and was believed to have been brain dead, ruling out the possibility of voluntary organ donation. “Since the hospital had two patients who needed the kidneys, the transplant was done in accordance with Kuwaiti laws, we have been informed,” said Ruhunuge. In a letter to the Sri Lankan Embassy, the Kuwaiti Department of Organ Transplantation stated that Kuwaiti law allows for organ removal with the consent of the Minister of Health. Speaking at the demonstration in Colombo, Ajith Perera, who had contact with people who had assisted Ms. Satharasinghe in her final days, stated: “Through Sri Lankans working in hospitals there, we got to know that this business of organ transplant had been taking place for quite some time. I know of another Sri Lankan who was offered 10,000 Kuwaiti dinars and a visa for 10 years in place of his kidney. But he was sent back as he did not consent. Many high ranking people on either side are involved in this horrifying business and that is why I decided to join this campaign to create awareness and put pressure to end this corrupt trade. Ms. Satharasinghe’s son, Yohan Nelumdeniya, delivered a petition, addressed to Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga, to the Foreign Employment Bureau demanding that the circumstances surrounding his mother’s death be investigated and brought to light. The director of the Migrant Services Centre, David Soysa, also suspects that Ms. Satharasinghe’s case did not involve voluntary kidney donation. He spoke about the dangers facing Sri Lankan women when they go abroad as unskilled labor. “Poverty forces them to take these jobs without question,” and in the process they are deprived of basic rights, he said, adding: “The biggest problem is that there is no responsibility on the part of the labour-receiving country.”

Other sources indicate that Satharasinghe’s body was missing many pieces, including the bladder, kidneys, parts of the brain and eyes (corneas). The uterus, heart, lungs and liver can be removed from the victims of organ trafficking, but kidneys are the most common organ harvested. In the case of Satharasinghe, there was forewarning that her employers were looking for her kidneys before her mysterious death. Her exact cause of death is not known, and probably will never be independently or accurately known. At the end of August 2002, many weeks after her death, Sri Lankan officials were supposed to release information from the autopsy, after a probe that included visiting Kuwait, the employer, and the recipient of the kidneys, and conducting an autopsy in Colombo months after the official organ removal at the Kuwaiti transplant center on July 12, 2002, but this information is presently not readily available online; it has either been scrubbed or the report was never released. Not that the official autopsy report would make much of a difference in this situation, considering the witness testimony of Satharasinghe’s family and colleagues. The family of Satharasinghe was given some small monetary compensation for the organs by the Kuwaiti government.

Another publicized case of organ harvesting comes from the mysterious death of S. Jayalthilika, a 38-year-old woman who died in Kuwait on October 4, 2016. Her estranged husband, who was living in Saudi Arabia, sold her kidneys to the hospital, but when her body was flown back to Sri Lanka, they found evidence of further organ harvesting, including aortas, eyes and uterus. Again, Kuwait is at the center of these crimes, as the country is known to be a pioneer of organ transplants, even issuing a fatwa allowing organ transplants as acceptable under Sharia.

The harvesting of organs has no worldwide cultural boundaries except for the divide between rich and poor, but medical practices in the Middle East facilitate organ transplants — in other words, just don’t get caught trafficking the same organs they are all too eager to replace. Most of the contracted foreign workers are Sinhalese women who go to the Middle East for work; they sometimes return to their families in coffins under mysterious circumstances with mutilated bodies, but there is no official autopsy or report. The plot thickens when you consider that the government of Sri Lanka no longer releases statistics on these cases because they do not want an interruption to the flow of workers to maintain the economic benefits of the foreign worker programs. The overwhelming majority of employment agencies for these foreign domestic workers are owned by Muslims in a cartel of modern-day slave contracts; almost all of the victims of organ harvesting are Sinhalese women, but men can be lured into contracts, too. As can be seen from the UNHR conference statement above, the number of mutilated bodies from organ harvesting returned to Sri Lanka is significant, but there is a blanket of silence over these gruesome crimes, and there is no burden of responsibility, since no systematic or independent autopsy is done on the bodies of these victims.

The foreign worker cartel is operated almost exclusively by Muslims, both inside and outside of Sri Lanka, but the victims are almost always the Sinhalese here. These employment agencies conduct medical tests on the employees in Sri Lanka, so when the employee arrives in GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries, all of the vital medical details, including biometrics and blood type, of the migrant worker are already known in a shared database. The GCC countries only accept recruitment from their approved medical centers in Sri Lanka, which are exclusively operated by Muslim doctors, with almost no Sinhalese doctors appointed at these facilities. This exposes the Sinhalese workers to the potential risk of being victimized by organ trafficking networks in the Middle East. The Sri Lankan embassies in the Middle East are known to be weak, so they cannot make serious demands in the GCC for truth, justice or human rights, as the government is dependent on their low skill jobs; they are housemaids, manual labourers, cleaners and garbage collectors.

Note: Tamils and other minorities in Sri Lanka, including Muslims, can be victims here, but they are a much smaller number of cases, and most of the recent inter-communal conflict is a response from the Sinhalese, who justifiably feel they have been targeted by jihadists and have no other recourse.

Little has been done by the government of Sri Lanka to stop organ trafficking in the Middle East; its reticence can be seen in an article from the Sunday Times called “Protect Rights of Migrant Workers” in 2002:

Government officials say labour receiving countries are not ready to enter into bilateral agreements with the Sri Lankan government despite intensive lobbying by Colombo. “We can’t push those governments to enter into such agreements because it is Sri Lankans who are benefiting from these jobs,” one official explained.

And further,

Some officials for instance referred to the recent demonstration by migrants over Satharasinghe’s case as an “emotional outburst.”

The public demonstration over the organ harvesting death of Satharasinghe was too easily dismissed by officials. Also, the defeatist attitude here of the government officials is typical for reforming the protection of migrant workers, because of the powerful influence over the Sri Lankan government of the Islamic cartels running the foreign worker programs. The Sri Lankan MP responsible for the budget of the Foreign Employment Bureau, which administrates the migrant workers in the Middle East, was elected in 2015: Mohammed Mujibur Rahuman. He is well known as an anti-Israel extremist for his longtime membership in Palestine-Sri Lankan friendship societies; also, he has been linked to the criminal underworld of Islamic gangs in the “Maligawatta Team” from his hometown, a narcoterrorist organization neutralized by the previous government. However, distrust over MP Rahuman’s handling of the budget for the Foreign Employment Bureau has grown, because there are no solid budgetary plans to protect the migrant workers, implicating the MP in collaboration with the recruitment cartels at the highest levels. Further, Mujibur Rahuman started his career in the cartels, working at the counter of the Hemas travel agency in the 1990s, possibly without a valid IATA certificate, as was the practice of other Muslim-owned agencies illegally operating in the 1990s. He later became a manager of a recruitment agency while beginning his career in politics. Indeed, the politician controlling the recruitment cartels from the government side, MP Mujibur Rahuman, on one occasion attempted to stop the distribution of the Royal Standard of Sinhala, which is thousands of years old, by going to a police station armed with a team of six angry Muslim lawyers. So there is no political help for the Sinhalese victims who go to the Middle East as foreign workers only to return to their families as hideously mutilated corpses in coffins.

Cultural differences are another source of conflict, as the Sinhalese women come from a non-violent culture, but in the Middle East, they are easy prey for criminal networks in a culture of extreme Islam under Sharia. The horror these victims of organ harvesting face is unimaginable; they are lured to their deaths in an employment contract in the Middle East, considering the fact that the body parts must be extracted at the time of death. But on the black market, body parts may even be extracted while the victim is still alive, as there are no legal barriers to prevent this procedure.

Human rights experts believe that the receiver of the foreign workers must be held responsible for their safety and protection, but this does not happen in Sri Lanka, because the receiver is an Islamic cartel, and the government is powerless to intercede, in light of the risk of losing a large source of income for the country’s economy. Sri Lanka was a major source of organ transplants and the illegal organ trafficking industry, but in 2016, the new government under President Maithripala Sirisena changed this with radical new reforms banning transplants for foreigners in the country after a scandal emerged with organs harvested from India. Further, the current President recently discussed alternatives to the foreign worker program with Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte, so a likely solution is to stop the foreign worker programs in the Middle East.

The organ trafficking industry is a multi-million dollar business on the black market, which authorities believe are run by the same criminal networks that are involved in weapons and drug trafficking, particularly heroin. In 2010, over 10,000 illegal body parts were harvested according to the World Health Organization (WHO), and the number has not decreased since then. In 2017, 24 people were rescued from an organ trafficking ring in Pakistan, in which one victim was held prisoner for three months. The organ harvesting of Sinhalese foreign workers by vicious Islamic criminal networks in the Middle East is a problem shrouded in silence in Sri Lanka, and is similar to the sterilization program of these same foreign workers, which is another serious problem almost entirely ignored by the Sri Lankan government, the UN, and other human rights agencies.

Very little is being done to protect these workers from hideous human rights abuses that seem to be targeting the Sinhalese population in Sri Lanka; the Sinhalese are literally being enslaved by evil Islamic overlords in the GCC. These gross violations of basic human dignity are a source of growing inter-communal conflict in Sri Lanka between Muslims and the Sinhalese, who are continually being victimized by a campaign of jihad from many different directions. Now, there is a chilling fact that human trafficking gangs are actively luring Sinhalese foreign workers into the Middle East for organ harvesting through Muslim-operated recruitment cartels. Perhaps more cultural diversity should exist in the recruitment process for migrant workers, to defuse these Islamic cartels and promote equality, but somehow this seems unlikely as more bodies of mutilated foreign workers return home in coffins to their families.

Please take a moment to reflect on the tragic life of Somalatha Satharasinghe, the first known publicized victim of human organ harvesting from the foreign employment program in Sri Lanka; who, evidence reveals, was lured to her mysterious death in the Middle East through contract slavery operated by a brutal Islamic cartel, only to be scrubbed from history, like the hundreds of other organ harvesting victims in Sri Lanka, covered by a shroud of silence.