A man and a teenage girl were arrested in Venezuela for offering the sale of human organs on social networks, the scientific police reported Tuesday, days following the arrest of a woman who offered a kidney for $20,000.
A 41-year-old man, identified as Franklin Rosalesand a 16-year-old girl, whose name was withheld, were captured in Saint Felix (Bolivar state, South) for “marketing a kidney” on the platform Marketplace “through fake profiles on Facebook”, reported Douglas Rico, head of the Scientific, Penal and Criminal Investigations Corps (CICPC).
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Rico posted on Instagram that agents seized a cell phone in which “the active participation of the detainees is evidenced.”
No further details of the organ and its origin are known, nor of the sale offer.
The arrests, added the police chief, occurred following “a public complaint made by social networks” of “several images that refer to the sale of human organs.”
Last Saturday, the attorney general, Tarek William Saab, reported that a woman, Marielys del Carmen Yedr, was arrested for offering a kidney for $20,000 in Marketplace.
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The prosecutor published on Twitter photographs of the advertisement published by the detainee, offering “a kidney of a 15-year-old girl in perfect condition.”
Saab then expressed that the Public Ministry was investigating whether there was a “criminal network” behind this type of publication.
There is no official record of organ trafficking in this Caribbean country, in a severe economic crisis for almost a decade, where thousands of people struggle daily once morest the shortage of drugs to treat chronic diseases, including kidney diseases, and the limited amount of dialysis sites.
The state organ transplant program ceased operations in 2017.
The government maintains that its suspension is due to the economic sanctions led by the United States once morest Venezuela, but several NGOs denounce that the program began to show flaws since 2015.
