New Witness Tells of 36 China Concentration Camps, Falun Gong Bodies Used as “Raw Materials” for Profiteering

NEW YORK (FDI) — The Falun Dafa Information Center has received information from a third witness professing first-hand knowledge of concentration camps throughout China holding Falun Gong adherents, who are killed for their organs and cremated, with victims sometimes still alive. The source, who spoke with The Epoch Times Thursday (story) on condition of anonymity, identifies himself as a veteran medical doctor who has served in the Shenyang military zone.

The source confirmed fears surrounding a recently-alleged camp—said to be in the Sujiatun district of Shenyang city, China—saying recent reports “are true,” while indicating that the scope of the problem far exceeds that previously imagined. A total of some 36 similar camps exist throughout China, he says. Falun Gong practitioners are sent to the camps when “occasion calls for it,” with the three largest camps being in the northern China provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning. The fifth-largest camp, located in the Jiutai district of Jilin, holds as many as 14,000-plus Falun Gong at a time. The largest camp, codenamed “672-S,” is said to hold over 120,000 people, among whom are Falun Gong and other prisoners of conscience.

In a related development, the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG) said on Thursday that its investigators had spoken with medical staff in eight of China’s provinces, each of whom disclosed that organs being used in transplant surgeries had indeed come from imprisoned Falun Gong adherents.

The source, said to be a military doctor, meanwhile, has indicated that it is the lucrative selling of captives’ organs and bodily materials that is driving the camps. “Falun Gong practitioners… are no longer regarded as human beings, but as raw materials for commercial products,” he told The Epoch Times. “One must understand that… the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee decided to treat Falun Gong practitioners as ‘class enemies’ and handle them in any manner that is economically profitable.”

According to the source, captive Falun Gong adherents are shipped in “sealed freight trains” to and from the camps, with as many as 5,000 being transferred in a single day. “I witnessed a specially-dispatched freight train transferring over 7,000 people in a trip from Tianjin city to the Jilin area,” the source recalled. “It ran at night, guarded by the Chinese army. Everyone on board was handcuffed to specially designed handrails atop the ceiling, like rotisserie chickens.”

Information Center spokesperson Levi Browde remarked today: “The self-identified military doctor’s testimony joins a growing list of horrifying and detailed disclosures that suggest that our worst fears are true: that Falun Gong practitioners are being held in concentration camps throughout China and killed, by the communist regime, for their organs. That ‘Never again’ we promised ourselves after World War II is happening again, it appears.”

Significantly, the military source upped previous figures of those believed to have been held at or gone through the Sujiatun camp. He indicates that over 10,000 (as opposed to 6,000) were being kept there as of early 2005. The number at present is around 600–750, however. Many have been transferred “to other concentration camps,” possibly in response to media coverage and the related disclosures of two Chinese sources. The source sounded a cautionary note, saying that, “It’s useless to enter Sujiatun to try to investigate the concentration camp, because transferring a few thousand people elsewhere is easy [for authorities to do].”

If past indicators are meaningful, that prospect could prove real. Time magazine documented Beijing authorities actually packing SARS patients into ambulances and driving them in circles around the city in 2003, amidst the devastating outbreak, in an effort to elude World Health Organization investigators who had come to examine China’s hospitals amidst allegations of cover-up. A broad range of Chinese officials, medical workers, and military staff had to participate in the now well-known scandal for it to successfully mislead media and investigators for months. Ultimately it was one courageous Chinese physician who broke the story.

The source further indicated Thursday that Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regulations dating back to as early as 1962 paved the way for the rampant “harvesting” of prisoner organs now taking place. A legal document issued by the CCP’s powerful Central Military Commission is said to have given provincial governments authority to establish “recycling entities” that would “process” those felons in the military zone under its administration “according to the developmental needs of the state or of socialism.” In 1984, following an amendment, this evolved into the fully-legalized extraction of organs from felons.

Further, many of China’s crematoriums allegedly retain the bodies that are under their care instead of performing cremation, shipping the bodies elsewhere via secret networks. The source says that “in many cases the ashes given to the families of executed prisoners come from animals or other people’s bodies,” with the actual corpse being sold at high cost to state-owned enterprises. There they are used “as raw materials” for a variety of “products.”

A recent investigative report by The Guardian found that the tissues of executed prisoners in China are being used in cosmetic products, some of which are sold in the West to unwitting consumers.

“In the face of such grave and horrifying allegations, we must bring the full weight of the international community to bear on this matter,” says Browde. “The details we have received so far are shocking, yet sadly in line with the CCP’s history of mass killing and wanton disregard for human life. It demands a complete, thorough, and relentless investigation by the international community. We are calling on all governments and relevant organizations to step forward and ensure such an investigation is carried out.”