Ike Ekweremadu, a former deputy senate president, was recently given a 9 year, 8 month prison term by a UK court. Beatrice Ekweremadu, his wife, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, and Obeta received a ten-year sentence.
According to Metro UK, he was imprisoned for planning to have a young guy trafficked to the UK so that his organs could be harvested for their ailing daughter. This was a legal first.
Millionaire Senator Ike Ekweremadu, 60, his wife Beatrice, 56, and medical “middleman” Dr. Obinna Obeta, 51, were convicted guilty in March at the Old Bailey following a landmark case involving contemporary slavery.
To donate a kidney to the Ekweremadus’ 25-year-old daughter Sonia, their victim, a street vendor from Lagos, was transported to the UK.
After the Royal Free Hospital stopped the private £80,000 procedure, he escaped in fear for his safety and entered a police station precisely a year ago to tell what had happened.
Ike Ekweremadu was sentenced to nine years and eight months in prison on Friday in a televised sentencing, with Mr. Justice Johnson acknowledging his “substantial fall from grace.”
The senior judge said: ‘People-trafficking across international borders for the harvesting of human organs is a form of slavery.
‘It treats human beings and their body parts as commodities to be bought and sold.
‘It is a trade that preys on poverty, misery and desperation.’
He told the defendants: ‘You each played a part in that despicable trade.’
On the question of harm to the victim, if the intended transplant went ahead,
he said: ‘He would have faced spending the rest of his life with only one kidney and without the requisite funding for the required aftercare.’
He added the risks had not been properly explained and there had been no consent ‘in any meaningful sense’.
During the hearing, the victim, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, said he only found out what was planned when he was taken to the north London hospital for an initial consultation.
In a statement read to court: ‘I would never (have) agreed to any of this.
‘My body is not for sale.’
He spoke of his fears for his own safety and that of his family in Nigeria who had been visited and told to ‘drop’ the case.
He said: ‘I cannot think about going home to Nigeria.
‘These people are extremely powerful and I worry for my family.
‘Even though I live here in the UK at the moment I know I need to be careful too.
‘I have no-one here, no family, no friends.
‘I am having to start my life again.
‘I’m worried about my family in Nigeria but I have been told my dad had been visited and was told to drop the case in the UK.’
It is the first time anyone has been convicted under the Modern Slavery Act of an organ-harvesting conspiracy.
Scotland Yard declined to say whether more charges would be brought but said the investigation was ongoing.
Police have highlighted soaring numbers of modern slavery cases in recent years with a small number involving organ harvesting.
