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A surgeon forced to remove the organs of a prisoner slaughtered by the Chinese authorities now ferries Londoners across the capital as an Uber driver.

But his life in London is far removed from what he was forced to do in China.

One summer's day in 1995 Enver Tothi was told to assemble a surgical team and head out on a special assignment.

The enthusiastic young surgeon hopped in an ambulance the following day and was driven out of his home town of Ürümqi to the countryside in the far northwest of China, where he found his boss waiting for him.

As instructed, Dr Tothi waited behind the crest of a hill until he heard gunshot, at which point he led his medical team over the summit.

The sight that greeted them on the other side was a gory one.

(Image: Philip Coburn)

Between ten and 20 men wearing prisoners' uniforms were lying dead on the side of the hill, the front part of most of their heads blown away by the military police who now stood over their twitching corpses.

Dr Tothi, who has since fled to the UK and now makes a living driving a cab around Shoreditch, worked quickly, cutting the liver and kidneys out of one of the slaughtered dissidents.

"I became a robot," the father-of-three told MirrorOnline.

"You carry out what you are programmed to do.

"When I cut through there was bleeding, which means the heart was still beating. I understood why.

"This man was shot to the right chest. They knocked him out but did not let him die immediately so I had time to remove the organs.

"It was an easy and quick operation which took ten to fifteen minutes. Even less because it’s a destructive operation.

"The chief surgeon put the organs in a box and said 'now you take your team back to hospital, and today nothing happened'."

(Image: AFP via Getty Images)

When Dr Tothi was made to carry out the brutal surgery, the Chinese Communist Party was concerned with the Falun Gong - a religious group that top brass considered to be a grave threat to their authority.

The identity of the man he was forced to operate on, without anesthetic, remains a mystery to him.

Yet it is almost certain he was a practitioner of a group systematically oppressed, beaten and killed by the CCP until its once formidable 70,000,000 membership base was forced underground or overseas.

Tens of thousands of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience are thought to have been killed so that their organs could be sold in the lucrative blackmarket.

Fast forward 24 years and the administration has turned its attention and, as the China Tribunal concluded earlier this year, their surgical knives, to Uighur Muslims.

Dr Tothi testified at the Tribunal in June, telling how he experienced a system in which political dissidents find themselves victims of a brutal and inhumane regime.

"After the cultural revolution, we believed every single citizen's duty is against enemies of the state," explained Dr Tothi of his youth in '70s and '80s China.

"Once someone has been sentenced to imprisonment, they are not qualified as a human being. That was how we felt at the time.

"And in day to day life if you show any sign of dissatisfaction to the system you were subject to public humiliation."

(Image: BBC)

It may be this sense of 'us vs them', an intense apathy or fear of retribution that underlines the current situation in China, where about 1,000,000 Uighur have been locked up without a trial in reeducation camps in the far western Xinjiang region.

The public may also be in the dark about how inhumanely Uighur are being treated, given the widespread disinformation campaign surrounding their imprisonment.

A new report published in BMC Medical Ethics found that official organ donor data compiled by the China Organ Transplant Response System and the Red Cross Society of China underscores how the authorities cover their tracks.

Eight years of data conformed to a precise mathematical formula, suggesting bogus figures had been published to mask illegal voluntary donations incentivised by large cash payments, as well as non voluntary donors.

When Doctor Tothi was still in the country however, the CCP and its harvesting practices were under far less scrutiny.

"It was a summer day, maybe August or July, and my chief surgeon called me into his office and asked if I wanted to do something wild," he recalled of the day before the harvesting.

(Image: Philip Coburn)

"I said 'sure, why not?' I was a young surgeon and anything challenging was welcome."

As instructed, Dr Tothi gathered two nurses and the largest operating tools available and set off behind a car at 9.30am the following day.

He was surprised when the car led them away from the hospital's regional branch, and even more surprised when his chief surgeon warned the team to wait until they heard gunshot.

Dr Tothi said: "I thought 'oh my god this is where they kill people.'

"There was no choice but to wait. We were quite anxious and nervous. We couldn’t stop smoking.

"One of the nurses was saying ‘Why are we here? I’m scared’. After a while we start hearing the noises.

"Truck noise, people shouting, then there’s gun shots. It’s not machine guns. It’s like many rifles shooting at the same time.

"Then we rush in."

Dr Tothi was directed to the dying prisoner who had been loaded into a medical van by his chief surgeon and told to get to work.

(Image: Philip Coburn)

"My chief surgeons were behind me, telling me how to do it quick," he said.

"When I tried to cut into him he began to struggle. He wasn't dead yet but he was too weak to resist.

"I don't know if he opened his eyes. He stopped moving shortly after I cut through.

"I am not sure when he actually died."

After handing the organs to his superior and cleaning up the medical tools, Dr Tothi left with his surgical team.

He never spoke of the incident with his colleagues and believes that they never uttered a word about it.

For the young doctor, refusing to do the surgery was not an option.

"If you are told to do it there is no way you can not do it," he said.

"If you try to get out of it then you will be put in (prison) yourself. You will become the enemy of the state."

Perhaps surprisingly Dr Tothi returned to his normal life suffering no emotional fallout from the experience - something he attributes to the hanged bodies that regularly littered his home city's streets while he grew up.

(Image: Philip Coburn)

After sharing his later observations of the unusually high rates of cancer in Shinju with documentary makers in 1998, he was forced to leave China.

Dr Tothi moved first to Turkey and then on to the UK, following a tip off from a journalist that he would soon be extradited back to China.

Each year for eight years he attempted to pass an exam that would allow him to practice as a doctor in the UK, only to fail by the smallest of margins each time.

He has since given up, finding work first as a driver of the 254 from Aldgate to Caledonian Road and then as an Uber driver.

When he is not at work Dr Tothi speaks about his experience and the Uighur Muslims - who he believes are being "eliminated" so they won't interfere with China's quest for global domination via its Belt and Road Initiative.

He speaks out in the hope the West will begin pressuring Chinese authorities to stop their treatment of the Uighur.

"I think what the world should do is cut off ties with the Chinese medical industry," he said.

"We should refuse to teach Chinese students medicine. Refuse to publish surgeon's articles in the west. Refuse to go to medical association events.

"Those doctors are doing it. They know what they’re doing. It is not the majority of surgeons, but they know what they are doing."