A UK court on Friday jailed Nigeria’s former deputy Senate president for nine years and eight months, following his landmark conviction for plotting to harvest a man’s kidney for his sick daughter.
In the first UK case of its kind, judge Jeremy Johnson handed Ike Ekweremadu, 60, the prison sentence for his part in a “despicable trade” that took advantage of the “poverty, misery and desperation” of vulnerable people.
“People-trafficking across international borders for the harvesting of human organs is a form of slavery,” the judge at London’s Old Bailey criminal court said as he handed down the jail term.
“It treats human beings and their body parts as commodities to be bought and sold,” he added, noting the sentence represented a “substantial fall from grace” for Ekweremadu.
The multi-millionaire Nigerian politician was found guilty in March of conspiring to traffic the young street trader into Britain for his body part.
Also convicted were Ekweremadu’s wife Beatrice, 56, and Obinna Obeta, 51, a doctor who acted as a middleman in the plot.
Beatrice Ekweremadu was jailed for four years and six months and Obeta for 10 years.
The Ekweremadus’ daughter Sonia, 25, had shed tears back in March as she was cleared of the same charge after jurors deliberated for nearly 14 hours.
On Friday, she waved to her parents from the public gallery as they were led out to start their sentence. Neither of them showed any emotion as they were sentenced.
‘Bravery’
In Britain, it is legal to donate a kidney, but not for financial or material reward.
It was the first time organ harvesting conspiracy charges had been brought under the UK’s 2015 Modern Slavery Act.
Andy Furphy, the Metropolitan Police’s Modern Slavery and Exploitation lead, said the Ekweremadus had “exerted their political influence and power and control over a young man who was vulnerable by his economic circumstances”.
