05 April 2022 Own staff According to a new Australian study, surgeons in China have extracted the hearts of execution-row inmates before they were medically brain-dead. The Australian National University study, which was published in the American Journal of Transplantation on Tuesday, looked at thousands of Chinese medical publications published over decades to argue that state-hired surgeons were used to kill inmates through organ transplant operations. While official Chinese records show that the detainees were brain-dead before the organs were extracted, the study’s researchers claim that this is not the case. However, this is the first comprehensive investigation to demonstrate that when prisoners’ hearts and lungs were removed from them on the operating table in Chinese state and military hospitals, they were still alive. According to the findings, surgeons were functioning as executioners rather than firing squads, which was a violation of international medical ethics. “We found that the physicians became the executioners on behalf of the state, and that the method of execution was heart removal,” study co-author and Ph.D. researcher Matthew Robertson said.
