A wealthy Nigerian politician, his wife, and a physician were all sentenced to prison on Friday by a London court for smuggling a street vendor into the country in order to unlawfully remove his kidney for transplantation into their daughter, who was in critical condition.
Ike Ekweremadu was given a sentence of nine years and eight months in Britain’s first unlawful organ-harvesting plotting, according to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), while his wife Beatrice, 56, received a term of four years and six months.
Obinna Obeta, a 51-year-old Nigerian doctor who the CPS described as a middleman by the prosecution, was sentenced to ten years in prison. In March, the three were found guilty of plotting to set up a man’s travel so they could take his organs.
Ahmad Lawan, the president of the Nigerian senate, revealed earlier this week that on behalf of the body, he had written to the British legal authorities pleading for mercy for Ekweremadu, an opposition senator and former vice president of Nigeria’s senate.
“It was the first time our colleague is getting involved in this kind of thing” he stated.
According to the prosecution, the couple lured the man to Britain in February of last year with the promise of employment and the offer of a few thousand pounds in exchange for his organ.
The man, who had made a career in Lagos selling telephone components in a market, reported being trafficked and being targeted for kidney harvesting when he went to the police.
The planned transplant was never carried out because a physician at London’s Royal Free hospital had doubts about the circumstances surrounding the prospective donor, a man or woman in his or her early twenties whom the family had attempted to pass off as their daughter’s cousin and who was ready to undergo the procedure.
Sonia Ekweremadu, the organ’s intended recipient who needs dialysis due to a severe and rapidly worsening renal ailment, was found not guilty.
