Police in the southeastern Nigerian state of Imo are investigating a possible organ-harvesting ring after finding a hideous trove of mutilated corpses at a hotel.
The Imo horror is an especially grim example of Nigeria’s kidnapping epidemic, in which every sort of malevolent group — from Islamic State jihadis to huge bandit gangs and small groups of petty criminals — kidnaps vulnerable people. Sometimes the kidnappers hold their victims for ransom and murder them if the ransom is not paid. In other cases, the abductors are looking for child brides.
In Imo, it appears a kidnapping ring was carving up its victims to harvest their organs. State police said on Monday that during their “ongoing war against kidnapping,” they tracked an unnamed suspect to an illegal mortuary and nearby hotel that he owned.
“At the mortuary, decomposed and mutilated dead bodies were discovered in unhygienic conditions, raising suspicions of illegal organ-harvesting activities,” said a police spokesman.
According to the UK Daily Mail, over a hundred bodies were found at the “organ-harvesting slaughterhouse.” Both the hotel and mortuary were sealed by police while forensic teams examined the scene.
Nigeria’s Punch newspaper reported on Monday that the organ-harvesting investigation was related to the “intensive manhunt for armed men who attacked motorists and abducted passengers” in a nearby community.
Police responded in force after a group of armed men ambushed two vehicles, fatally shooting the driver of one and kidnapping the passengers in the other. Security teams were said to be “bush-combing, search-and-rescue, and suspect-tracking within the Amala forest axis and surrounding communities.”
The implication behind linking these two stories is that the carjacking gang has been kidnapping travelers and taking them to the “illegal mortuary” for their organs to be harvested. The police have yet to identify any of the perpetrators involved in the vehicle ambush, but they named the suspect wanted in connection with the mortuary as Stanley Morocco Oparaugo.
The state police said on Monday that “maximum security has been deployed” along the road where the ambush took place, to protect holiday travelers.
Human rights advocates say illegal organ harvesting has reached an “epidemic level” in Nigeria and across much of Africa. Some of the supply comes from impoverished people willing to sell their organs at bargain prices, and from unscrupulous doctors who harvest organs from dead patients without consent, but there has been a disturbing rise in kidnapping and murder for the purpose of trafficking organs.
Another unsettling trend is the rise of “baby factories” in Nigeria — facilities where kidnapped women are forcibly impregnated so their children can be sold off. The buyers are usually childless couples who have had difficulty with legal adoptions, but human rights activists fear the baby factories could also do business with organ traffickers.
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu declared a state of national emergency in late November after a string of brutal attacks and mass abductions, with school children comprising many of the victims. Tinubu has been struggling to defend his government against President Donald Trump’s accusation that it did little to prevent the violent persecution of Christians by jihadi gangs.