Ike Ekweremadu, a former vice president of the senate, and his wife Beatrice were accused of trafficking organs in the UK.
After a six-week trial at the Old Bailey, the couple, along with their daughter Sonia and a doctor named Dr. Obinna Obeta, were found accountable for aiding a young man’s travel to Britain with the intention of exploitation.
The jury found on Thursday that they had criminally plotted to lure the 21-year-old street vendor from Lagos to London so they could take advantage of him for his kidney.
According to The Guardian UK, Justice Jeremy Johnson will sentence the defendant at a later time.
For trafficking in organs, Ekweremadu, Beatrice, Sonia, and Obeta were on trial at the Old Bailey.
The Modern Slavery Act was used for the first time to convict them on Thursday.
Ekweremadu and his wife were detained in the UK last year on suspicion of smuggling a young man into the nation for kidney harvesting.
The young man allegedly pretended to be Sonia’s cousin in an unsuccessful attempt to convince medical staff to perform a $80,000 private surgery at London’s Royal Free Hospital.
After kidney disease prompted Sonia to withdraw from a master’s degree in film at Newcastle University, the young man was allegedly given an unlawful reward to donate his organs for Sonia.
The guy and other potential contributors were seen as “disposable assets – spare components for reward,” the prosecution, Hugh Davies KC, told the court, alleging that Ekweremadus and Obeta.
According to him, they had a “business transaction” with the individual that was “emotionally frigid.”
According to Davies, Ekweremadu’s actions demonstrated “entitlement, dishonesty, and hypocrisy.”
Ekweremadu, according to him, “agreed to reward someone for a kidney for his daughter – someone in poverty from whom he separated himself and made no enquiries, and with whom, for his own political protection, he wanted no direct touch.”
Davies added, “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.”
It was reported on March 14 that Beatrice denied being involved in the effort to find an organ donor for their sick daughter Sonia.
Ekweremadu stated, according to reports, that he got engaged with the young man after his doctor recommended him not to look for a kidney donor among his relatives.
