A Chinese crime ring has been accused of stealing more than 4,000 dead bodies from crematoriums and medical laboratories to use their bones for dental grafts.
The case caused widespread public anger after a well-known criminal lawyer published details of the case on social media on Thursday.
Yi Shenghua, president of the law firm Beijing Brave Lawyer, said that the police in Taiyuan, capital of the northern province of Shanxi, were investigating allegations that the bones were being used to produce allogeneic bone grafts, which are usually made using bones removed during surgery.
A spokesman for the Taiyuan municipal procuratorate confirmed that prosecutors are investigating allegations that a crime ring was “stealing and reselling corpses for profit”, when contacted on Thursday.
But he declined to reveal more details, only saying the investigation still needs more time as the case is “rather complicated”.
The state-run funeral industry is currently in the spotlight because of a series of arrests by anti-corruption investigators.
Yi told Shanghai-based news portal Thepaper.cn that the evidence, marked as “prosecution opinion”, had been passed to him by an “insider” and was “authentic”. His office did not answer when telephoned for comment.
His social media post said a company named Shanxi Aorui Biomaterials was suspected of illegally buying corpses and limbs from Sichuan, Guangxi and Shandong provinces and using them to produce the bone grafts.
He claimed the company had earned 380 million yuan (US$53 million) in this period, mostly from proceeds of selling the bones for dental grafts.
Allogeneic grafts are used when patients do not have sufficient bone density for grafts, but the bone is usually taken from consenting patients who undergo operations such as hip replacement.
The police seized more than 18 tonnes of bones and over 34,000 semi-finished and finished products, according to the documents published by Yi.
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They also said a suspect surnamed Su, who was the company’s general manager, confessed that he stole more than 4,000 human bodies from crematoriums in Yunnan, Chongqing, Guizhou and Sichuan.
The crematorium staff in Yunan’s Shuifu city, Chongqing’s Banan district, Guizhou’s Shiqian county and Sichuan’s Daying county, roughly dismembered the bodies so they could be transported to Su’s company for further processing, it said.
The documents also said a further 75 suspects had been detained during the investigation.
Workers at the crematoriums are suspected of dismembering the bodies to sell the bones to Yi. The investigation is also looking into claims that the liver centre at Qingdao University Hospital in Shandong illegally sold corpses to the company.
Li Baoxing, director of the liver centre, was named in the documents as a suspect. He has previously been repeatedly praised by the state for his contribution to medical science, and in 2005 was listed among hundreds of China’s “Model Workers” that year as determined by the State Council.
The civil affairs bureau in Guilin, a city in Guangxi region, told Thepaper it is investigating claims that a medical college and three funeral homes had also been selling corpses to the crime ring.
