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Six-year-old boy's eyes gouged out in gruesome attack
The Shanxi province boy may have been targeted by organ traffickers
Wednesday, 28 August, 2013, 1:01pm
Jeremy Blum and Agence France-Presse in Beijing


A boy lies on his hospital bed with his eyes covered with bandages as his mother sits next to him in Taiyuan, north China's Shanxi province on Tuesday. Photo: AFP


A six-year-old boy in China had his eyes gouged out in a gruesome attack that may have blinded him for life.

The boy, named Binbin, was a native of Linfen city in the mainland's Shanxi province, Xinhua reported. According to his mother, he had gone missing while playing outside his house on the afternoon of 24 August. He was later found covered in blood by family members some three to four hours later.

“He had blood all over his face. His eyelids were turned inside out. And inside, his eyeballs were not there,” his devastated father told Shanxi Television reporters.

The child’s eyes were found nearby but the corneas were missing, early reports said, implying that an organ trafficker may have been behind the harrowing attack.

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News of the attack on the boy - who had a cleft palate - instigated outrage from hundreds of Weibo netizens.

“This is extraordinarily vicious,” said one Sina Weibo user. “How and why could someone be so cruel?”

“A truly tragic boy,” said another poster.

Professor Arthur Caplan, a spokesman for Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting who was interviewed by the UK-based Daily Mail for his view on the story, did not rule out the possibility of organ trafficking, saying that Binbin's situation was horrific but unfortunately not surprising.

"In-demand corneas for corrective eyesight operations can be taken from any age and body type," Caplan reportedly said. "Anyone who knows where the corneas are located in the eye can extract them, and I fear for the unsterile conditions and the barbaric methods used, and that infection may add to [Binbin's] suffering."

Binbin is currently still recovering in a Shanxi orthoptic hospital. His is the latest case in a series of organ removal incidents that have occured throughout China, including a mid-August crackdown on a group of black market organ sellers in Wuhan and several cases where teenagers sold their kidneys in illicit transplant operations, using the proceeds to buy iPhones and iPads.

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Initial reports said the boy, Gua Bin, was lured by an unidentified woman with a strange accent into a field on August 24 where she used an unspecified tool to gouge out his eyes.

Xinhua did not cite a possible motive for the aunt to attack the boy. The police finding seemed to conflict with the family’s initial comments on the boy’s assailant, which cited him as saying that the woman spoke with an accent from outside the area and had hair that was dyed blonde.

One of the case investigators reached by phone, a police officer in Fenxi county surnamed Liu, referred only to the Xinhua report and refused to answer further questions, saying he was not authorized to speak to the media. Calls to the city and county’s police bureaus’ propaganda departments rang unanswered. Guo’s mother’s mobile phone also rang unanswered.

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The Yanzhao Metropolis Daily quoted Guo’s mother as saying the boy’s account of the attack had varied from moment to moment.

“The child would say one thing at first and then another thing later. I asked him later, did she speak the way I do, and he said yes,” the report quoted her as saying.

The report described the family as saying that they did not see the aunt’s family frequently because they lived in different areas, though the boy was quoted as saying that he knew his aunt. Asked if the woman who grabbed him was his aunt, the boy said he did not know.

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/

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