Poland arrests Ukrainian woman convicted of selling 56 human kidneys

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WARSAW (Reuters) – Polish border guards detained a Ukrainian woman who was sentenced in Kazakhstan to 12 years in prison for participating in an organised criminal group trading in human organs and selling 56 kidneys, prosecutors said on Tuesday.

The 35-year-old woman, referred to only as Ksenia P. under Polish privacy laws, was detained at a railway crossing between Poland and Ukraine under an Interpol red notice, Marta Petkowska, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office in Przemysl, said in a statement.

The prosecutors didn’t say why the woman wasn’t in prison in Kazakhstan at the time she was detained at the crossing or when she was convicted.

She has been wanted by Interpol since November 2020, prosecutors said. An Interpol red notice is a request to global law enforcement to provisionally arrest a person pending extradition or similar legal action.

The woman was convicted for participation in an international organised criminal group that illegally collected tissues and organs from people from 2017 to 2019 and sold them on the black market, Petkowska added.

She was also convicted of illegally obtaining “kidneys from 56 injured parties in Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Thailand” for financial benefit and of “making the crimes committed a permanent source of income.”

The prosecution submitted a motion to a court to apply one week’s temporary arrest so that she could be extradited to Kazakhstan.

(Reporting by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk; Editing by Bernadette Baum)