Monster or Savior? Doctor Draws New Scrutiny
For a surgeon wanted by Interpol and suspected of harvesting human organs for an international black-market trafficking ring, Yusef Sonmez, was remarkably relaxed as he sipped Turkish red wine in a bustling kebab restaurant facing the wind-whipped Sea of Marmara.
(Doreen Carvajal, The New York Times) Friday, February 04, 2011
Dr. Sonmez, refreshed from a ski trip to Austria, spoke last month while on a break from business trips to Israel and operations on cancer patients here.
He boasts about the satisfaction of his kidney transplant surgeries, more then 2,400 by his count. He keeps friends (and, incidentally, investigators) up to date on his life via a blog and his Web site listing contact details. And in his seaside villa on the Asian side of Istanbul, he treasures a framed copy of a signed letter in 2003 from the Ministry of Health in Israel commending him for his life-saving aid to "hundreds of Israeli patients who are suffering from kidney diseases and awaiting transplants."
Yet Interpol is circulating an international red-alert notice for the Turkish surgeon's arrest with a mug shot of him in a surgical scrub cap. The Turkish authorities have shut down his private hospital. The local press has labeled him "Dr. Frankenstein." And an expert who monitors the lurid and lucrative global trade in human organs says Dr. Sonmez has been arrested at least six times in Turkey.
"There are two Yusufs, one my family and friends know and the one created in the press who is a monster- this is a drama, a tragedy," said Dr. Sonmez, 53, a trim, angular man with intense, gray-green eyes and a graying goatee. "Up to now, I didn't kill anybody. I didn't harm anybody, counting donors or recipients. I have not committed any kind of social harm to anyone. This is the main thing that I am proud of."
Of his surgical skills, he added, wryly, "I am the best in the world as long as my fingers aren't broken."
The illicit trade in human organs is a multimillion-dollar business built on paying desperately poor people to extract their organs- mostly kidneys. These organs are then sold and transplanted to wealthier people facing long waits on government-approved lists for legal transplants.
Dr. Sonmez is wanted with regard to one of the most troubling prosecutions to emerge recently- a European Union investigation into trafficking in Kosovo in which seven people, mostly prominent local doctors, have been charged with illegal kidney transplants in a private clinic. Dr. Sonmez has not been charged in Kosovo, but the prosecution contends he played a central role in the ring.
That case has become intertwined with a volatile two-year Council of Europe inquiry that made links between the Kosovo prime minister, Hashim Thaci, and a criminal enterprise of some former Kosovo Liberation Army fighters accused of executing Serbian prisoners in 1999 and 2000 for their organs.
Dr. Sonmez has denied wrongdoing in either situation, but a Turkish immigrant who lost consciousness at an airport in Kosovo after a kidney removal, and the patient who investigators say received his kidney, both identified Dr. Sonmez as part of the operating team. He says he was only in the operating room offering advice to others.
Investigators have focused on the role of Dr. Sonmez in 2008 as a surgeon for the Medicus private clinic in a rundown neighborhood in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, where they said kidneys were removed from impoverished immigrants recruited on false promises of payment that they never received. The organs were transplanted to wealthy patients from Canada, Germany, Poland and Israel who paid up to €90,000, or $122,000.
In Turkey, he was not really seen as a hero in the traditional sense but as someone who stood up against the establishment because he kept operating even though he was exiled from one hospital to the next, said Aslihan Sanal, an anthropologist who has researched the activities of Dr. Sonmez in Turkey and found that patients measured him by their ability to survive.
Dr. Sonmez has been detained and released repeatedly in Istanbul during investigations of illegal transplants and money exchanges between donors and recipients. The son of an English teacher and a dentist, he said he trained at an Istanbul medical school and studied transplant surgery in Paris. He said the five-year survival rate for his kidney transplant patients was 84.7 percent, above Western standards, though it was not clear how many of the donors he had seen again.
