NEW YORK — Dr. Thomas Diflo had heard the rumors.

In the media, and among other kidney-transplant doctors, reports and rumors circulated that Chinese prison officials were harvesting the organs of executed prisoners.

Since Chinese prisoners are executed for crimes ranging from small-scale tax evasion to opposing the Communist regime, the country could offer a large supply of donors for the grisly practice.

As the director of renal transplantation at New York University Medical Center, Diflo has plenty of contact with Chinese immigrants who have received transplants overseas. Some of his patients told him that they had received organs from executed prisoners. Now, he is the first American doctor to have publicly revealed that he has treated patients who received organs in this way.

Diflo found the first such patient three years ago. Most of the patients he sees are “patients we've transplanted ourselves,” he said. If someone with a transplant from an outside hospital comes in seeking treatment, it's routine to ask where the transplant came from.

But some of Diflo's patients gave evasive replies, saying their new organs came from shadowy relatives or acquaintances back in China. “They were unable to define better who the relative or the acquaintance was, which made me” suspicious, Diflo said. Some patients told him directly, “I got it from an executed prisoner.” Diflo has seen about six patients with Chinese death-row kidneys.

Diflo told the hospital's ethics committee about his patients Jan. 11, and eventually told his story to the Village Voice weekly newspaper in New York.

“My objective was to publicize it and bring it out in the open,” he said.

Doctors and Executioners

That's the last thing the Chinese government wants.

According to the Laogai Research Foundation, which investigates human rights abuses in Chinese prisons, the rate of organ-snatching has risen in recent years.

The rise is fueled in part by improvements in medical technology, and in part by traditional Chinese cultural beliefs that lead very few Chinese people to donate their organs.

The Laogai Research Foundation says that execution methods vary based on which organ is wanted: a shot to the head to preserve the kidneys, a shot to the chest to keep the corneas intact.

Lethal injections have also spurred the rise in organ harvesting.

The sale of prisoners’ organs benefits guards and even judges, who may be paid by hospitals to inform them when a potential donor is sentenced to death. An investigator for the Laogai Research Foundation, who asked to remain anonymous because she still travels in China, said that the Chinese Journal of Organ Transplantation showed a steady rise in the number of transplants performed, but did not report how many came from executed prisoners.

The investigator told the Village Voice that courts sometimes set execution dates in order to coincide with a demand for organs.

Exiled Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng said that while he was still in prison in China, he once asked a fellow prisoner to help him uncover the organ trade. The prisoner, who was slated for execution, agreed to shout, “I'm not sick, I don't need a doctor,” if he saw doctors waiting to take his organs. If there were no harvesters waiting, the prisoner would just scream.

The prisoner's last act was to shout the message.

Wei told the story in 1998 testimony to the U.S. House of representatives, reported the Village Voice.

Wei added that while he was on death row in China, one of the guards told him that organ removal is sometimes used as the means of execution.

China strongly persecutes Catholics who refuse to join the state-controlled “Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.” In April, during Holy Week, the government arrested a bishop and many priests and lay Catholics, according to the Cardinal Kung Foundation, which monitors persecution of Chinese Catholics.

China executes more prisoners than all other nations combined, according to Amnesty International. The investigator for the Laogai Research Foundation told the Village Voice that a holiday surge in executions makes the Lunar New Year a particularly good time to get an organ.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., refused to return repeated telephone calls for this article.

However, Chinese spokesmen often point to laws prohibiting the sale of organs, and requiring that prisoners’ organs be taken only if consent is given or the body is unclaimed.

Human rights advocates replied that prisoners’ families often do not know that their relative has been killed, so they do not claim the body.

In the United States, the sale of organs is a felony. Live or executed prisoners cannot donate an organ, except to family members.

It is also against the law to make arrangements on U.S. soil to buy organs overseas.

For years, human-rights advocates have tried to prove that the Chinese organ trade reaches American shores.

In 1998, the FBI caught two men who arranged to fly patients to China for kidneys and to smuggle corneas.

The case fell apart when a key witness fled the country.

Dr. Diflo's Revelations

The next step, Diflo said, is to “find out exactly what the mechanism is, whether there's a middleman here in the United States or whether it all happens in China or what.”

The Laogai Research Foundation's investigator said that Diflo was an important witness because he “demonstrates that this is affecting the United States,” at least in the donor recipients who move here.

“Before, a great majority of the evidence involved things that were going on in China, or at most in Asia at large — Thailand, Malaysia and Hong Kong,” she said.

“That doesn't bring it home as much to the U.S. Congress as when [these patients come to] New York City.”