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Akinwande Soji-Ojo
The Central Criminal Court, in Old Bailey, United Kingdom, has sentenced former deputy senate president, Ike Ekweremadu, to nine years and eight months in prison for organ harvesting.
His wife, Beatrice, was handed four years and six months jail term during the sentencing on Friday.
On March 23, the jury pronounced a guilty verdict on the senator, his wife, Beatrice, and Obinna Obeta, a doctor who acted as the middleman.
Obeta was also sentenced to 10 years in prison and had his practising license suspended.
The jury held that they conspired to bring the 21-year-old at the centre of the matter to London to exploit him for his kidney.
The verdict is the first of its kind under the Modern Slavery Act 2015 of the United Kingdom.
The prosecutor, Hugh Davies KC, had told the court that Ekweremadus and Obeta had treated the man and other potential donors as “disposable assets – spare parts for reward.”
He said they entered an “emotionally cold commercial transaction” with the man, The UK Guardian reports.
The behaviour of Ekweremadu showed “entitlement, dishonesty and hypocrisy”, Davies told the jury.
He said Ekweremadu “agreed to reward someone for a kidney for his daughter – somebody in circumstances of poverty and from whom he distanced himself and made no inquiries, and with whom, for his own political protection, he wanted no direct contact.”
“What he agreed to do was not simply expedient in the clinical interests of his daughter, Sonia, it was exploitation, it was criminal. It is no defence to say he acted out of love for his daughter. Her clinical needs cannot come at the expense of the exploitation of somebody in poverty,” he added.
On March 14,Beatrice denied involvement in the search for an organ donor for their ailing daughter, Sonia.
Ekweremadu also claimed he involved the young man after he was advised by his doctor against seeking a kidney donor from among his family members.