A leaked court document said thousands of human bodies were bought illicitly from funeral homes, a medical lab, and a top hospital.
A Chinese biomaterial firm has been accused of trading thousands of stolen cadavers in an eight-year scheme, according to a leaked court document.
Between January 2015 and July 2023, Shanxi Osteorad Biomaterial Co., previously a state-owned company, and an affiliated firm, allegedly acquired more than 4,300 human cadavers from several funeral homes, a transplant center, and a medical university, to make bone grafting materials.
The company supplied allogeneic bone implantable materials to hospitals across 13 provinces and cities, the document said.
The leaked prosecution’s document, dated May 23, was first posted on Chinese social media platform Weibo on Aug. 8 by Yi Shenghua, a lawyer from Beijing who has almost 2.8 million followers.
Yi told Chinese state-backed media The Paper on Thursday that he is not involved in the case and had obtained the document from a source familiar with the matter.
According to the document, police had seized more than 18 metric tons of raw and semi-finished material and 34,077 units of finished product from the companies involved.
It also said Shanxi Osteorad had forged donor registration forms and quality control papers.
According to the document, Shanxi Osteorad was founded in 1999 by state-owned China Institute for Radiation Protection.
One of the two shareholders of the company, Su Chengzhong, set up a separate firm, Sichuan Hengpu Technology Limited, in 2014, and sourced cadavers by gaining the control of four funeral homes using investment, subcontracts, or infiltration, the document said.
The four funeral homes, allocated in three provinces, allegedly sold bodies or bones of 4,000 deceased people to Sichuan Hengpu instead of incinerating them. The price was 2,000 Chinese yuan ($280) each, or 2,500 yuan ($349) if bones were extracted.
Some cadavers were dismembered at the funeral homes while others were dismembered at Sichuan Hengpu. The company has sold more than 1,000 cadavers to Shanxi Osteorad, with the remainder in storage, the court document said.
Su also allegedly arranged a man Liu Zhiyong to work at Yibin Zhongshan Hospital and use the job as a cover to purchase an ambulance that was used for transporting the cadavers.
By Lily Zhou
