A young boy in Shanxi Province has been left blind after a woman gouged out his eyeballs.
Guo Bin, aged 6, went missing on Saturday, and was found unconscious in a field by his parents that evening with his face covered in blood.
After receiving extensive medical treatment, the boy said that he was threatened by a woman with an accent, suggesting she comes from a different province. He is still recovering in hospital.
Police are offering a 100,000 yuan reward (over $16,000) for any information that leads to the perpetrator’s arrest.
According to state mouthpiece China Radio International, the boy’s eyeballs were found nearby. China Radio International quoted police saying that the corneas, the transparent front part of the eye, were still attached to the eyeball. Earlier reports in the Chinese press, citing the boy’s parents, had indicated that the corneas were missing, raising fears that the case was a particularly brutal example of organ harvesting. It is impossible to independently verify the state’s later statement that the corneas were still attached to the eyes.
“This is terrible. With the Communist government in power, any kind of strange things can happen,” wrote a netizen on Sina Weibo.
Another commented on United Daily News: “I can’t believe that people can be this crazy and lawless.”
Ophthalmologist Chen Youxin at Peking Union Medical College Hospital told China Daily that there is a high demand for corneas in China, although legally they can only be removed from dead people.
“Corneas are quite limited in China because of the lack of donors,” Chen said, adding that “only 10 percent of the need is met.”
Dr. Torsten Trey, Executive Director of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) in New York, told Epoch Times via email that the incident may be connected to the widespread abuse of organ transplantation in China, where death row prisoners are harvested for organs, and prisoners of conscience in detention are killed for their organs.
“The ”self-service” mentality over more than a decade to harvest any kind of organ at any time from prisoners, in particular from Falun Gong practitioners, as they contributed to a large standing pool of potential, matching donors in China, has lead to a form of addiction among medical doctors in China (let alone the addiction to the fast money that they can easily earn with such operations),” Trey wrote.
The Communist Party has promised it would end the practice of organ sourcing from prisoners, but the reforms so far have been untransparent and unconvincing, Trey said.
“Black markets have been established in China,” Trey said.
Research by Hsin-Yi Lin.
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