organs, especially from children, has been found dead, BosNewsLife monitored Sunday, February 29.
The body of 53-year old Duraci Edinger, a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Mozambique’s northern town of Nampula, was discovered this week in her home near a blood stained hammer after neighbors alerted local police, investigators said.
Edinger was among a group of missionaries who raised alarm bells in 2001 about an alleged organ smuggling ring operating in the impoverished African nation. She later told church leaders she had received death threats from suspected organ smugglers following these revelations.
Edinger had been working in Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony, since 1998 as part of a denomination which experts say experienced spectacular growth across Africa. Over 1,1 million new members were added to Africa’s Lutheran Churches in the 2001-2003 period, an increase of roughly nine percent, according to church estimates.
DONOR CHILDREN
Other Christians investigating the plight of donor children have also been threatened, BosNewsLife learned. On Thursday, February 26, four Roman Catholic missionary nuns living in the same town told Portuguese radio TSF that they had narrowly escaped an armed ambush after presenting "evidence that local children are being killed so that their organs can be sold."
"This is a very delicate moment, we don’t know what is going to happen," the French News Agency AFP quoted Sister Juliana, of the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate order as saying. "Of course the guns are meant to kill, what could happen one day is that someone who speaks too much will be sentenced to be silenced forever."
The four nuns reportedly told a Spanish newspaper earlier this month that they had gathered testimony from would-be victims of the network who managed to escape and had photographs of dead children with missing organs. They said there have also been several attempts to abduct children from the orphanage they run in Nampula.
POPULAR PRESIDENT
Several Christians active in missionary work say local officials are involved in a cover up and the Mozambican Human Rights League has also made allegations of organ trafficking, several news agencies reported
But Mozambique’s authorities claim a preliminary investigation into the allegations, which included exhuming fourteen bodies in the Nampula region, brought no evidence of organ harvesting.
Local authorities have already told local media that the murder of Edinger has nothing to do with trafficking in human organs, but with a recent theft in her church. Edinger had reportedly been questioned by police seeking to determine the identity of the thief.
