Interpol issue 'red alert' for Turkish organ doctor

FOR a surgeon wanted by Interpol and suspected of harvesting human organs for an international black-market trafficking ring, Dr Yusef Sonmez, was remarkably relaxed as he sipped Turkish red wine in a bustling kebab restaurant facing the wind-whipped Sea of Marmara.

Sonmez, refreshed from a ski trip to Austria, was speaking while on a break from business trips to Israel and operations on cancer patients.

He boasts about the satisfaction of his kidney transplant surgeries, more than 2,400 by his count. He keeps friends and investigators up to date on his life via a blog and his website, listing contact details. And in his seaside villa on the Asian side of Istanbul, he treasures a framed copy of a signed letter in 2003 from the Ministry of Health in Israel commending him for his life-saving aid to "hundreds of Israeli patients who are suffering from kidney diseases and awaiting transplants".

Yet Interpol is circulating an international red-alert notice for the Turkish surgeon's arrest with a mugshot of him in a surgical scrub cap. The Turkish authorities have shut down his private hospital. The local press has labelled him "Dr Frankenstein". And an expert who monitors the lurid and lucrative global trade in human organs says Sonmez has been arrested at least six times in Turkey.

"There are two Yusufs, one my family and friends know and the one created in the press who is a monster - this is a drama, a tragedy," said Sonmez, 53. "Up to now, I didn't kill anybody. I didn't harm anybody. I have not committed any kind of social harm to anyone. This is the main thing that I am proud of."

Of his surgical skills, he added: "I am the best in the world as long as my fingers aren't broken."

The illicit trade in human organs is a multi-million-dollar business built on paying desperately poor people to allow their organs to be extracted - mostly their kidneys. These organs are then sold and transplanted to wealthier people facing long waits on government-approved lists for legal transplants.

Sonmez is wanted with regard to one of the most troubling prosecutions to emerge recently - a European Union investigation into trafficking in Kosovo in which seven people, mostly prominent local doctors, have been charged with illegal kidney transplants in a private clinic. Sonmez has not been charged in Kosovo, but the prosecution contends he played a central role in the ring.

That case has become intertwined with a volatile two-year Council of Europe inquiry that made links between the Kosovo prime minister, Hashim Thaci, and a criminal enterprise of some former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters accused of executing Serbian prisoners in 1999 and 2000 for their organs.

Sonmez has denied wrongdoing in either situation, but a Turkish immigrant who lost consciousness at an airport in Kosovo after a kidney removal, and the patient who investigators say received his kidney, both identified Sonmez as part of the operating team. He says he was only in the operating room offering advice to others.

Investigators have focused on the role of Sonmez in 2008 as a surgeon for the Medicus private clinic in a rundown neighbourhood in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, where they said kidneys were removed from impoverished immigrants recruited on false promises of payment that they never received. The organs were transplanted to wealthy patients from Canada, Germany, Poland and Israel who paid up to 75,000.

Sonmez has been detained and released repeatedly in Istanbul during investigations of illegal transplants and money exchanges between donors and recipients. The son of an English teacher and a dentist, he said he trained at an Istanbul medical school and studied transplant surgery in Paris. He said the five-year survival rate for his kidney transplant patients was 84.7 per cent, above Western standards, though it was not clear how many of the donors he had seen again.

"This is amazing," he said of the transplant process. "I love it - to watch the changes with the new organ, the changes in the body, to move with the changes, to make changes in the medication."

Typically, he said, he requires donors and recipients to submit signed, notarised statements to declare that money has not been exchanged.

But in a district court in Pristina in December, the EU prosecutor Jonathan Ratel argued that Sonmez played a central role in transplants that took place in 2008, along with 11 other suspects, including a former secretary of health in Kosovo, and an Israeli doctor.

The court is expected to decide this week whether to press forward with a trial against seven people charged so far in the case, in which Turks, Russians, Moldovans and Kazakhs were allegedly lured to Pristina with false promises of payments for their kidneys.

"I have covered his tracks," said Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of medical anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley and director of Organ Watch.

"He is a transplant surgeon who has worked for years in many parts of the world with brokers who bring together donors with recipients. He is wanted in many countries and he knows what he is doing is illegal."