Teacher Allegedly Tried To Sell A 13-Year-Old Student: Potential Buyer Wanted To Remove, Sell Her Organs

A teacher in Ukraine is accused of trying to sell a 13-year-old girl in her care, even going so far as to contact a potential buyer who was interested in harvesting and selling her organs, BBC News is reporting.

Galina Kovalenko taught literature and the Russian and Ukranian languages at a boarding school in the Kharkiv region of eastern Ukraine for 20 years. The school was an orphanage and a home for troubled teenage girls.

UKRAINE: Police in the Kharkiv Region have arrested a teacher accused of trying to sell a 13-year-old girl for $10,000. pic.twitter.com/CGX7hgyBA8

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Authorities say the 52-year-old teacher concocted a plan to sell the girl to human traffickers for $10,000. It’s not clear, as of this writing, what website or method she used to try to sell the girl. However, according to The Telegraph, Ukranian authorities became aware of the plot, and with the help of an anti-human-trafficking unit, began monitoring the teacher’s activities.

Eventually, the teacher got into contact with a potential buyer. Police say that on one occasion, he paid 1,000 Ukranian hryvnias (about $39) for pictures of the girl and her medical records. The buyer had hinted that he was interested in buying the girl to remove and harvest her organs, which he intended to sell on the black market.

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Eventually, authorities set up a sting and, as Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov explained on Facebook, caught the teacher in the act.

“They got this seller ‘red-handed’ – when she took the girl out of the boarding school, brought her to the buyers and received money.”

Avakov, who is personally handling the investigation and prosecution of this case, says he’d like to see the teacher get life in prison. But unfortunately, he says, the maximum penalty she can get, under current law, is 12 years.

“I, as a man, as a father, I believe that for such crimes [a person] should get life. But the [law] only provides for from three to 12 years in prison.”

As of this writing, it is not clear what happened to the potential buyer and what kind of criminal penalties he is facing.

Ukraine, like many other former Soviet Bloc nations and other impoverished Eastern European nations, has been a hub of human trafficking ever since the fall of the Soviet Union back in 1991. By some estimates, as many as 160,000 Ukrainians have been sold into human trafficking since 1991, with 777 reported cases of human trafficking occurring in Ukraine this year alone.

Human trafficking victims are usually forced into sexual slavery and forced labor, and many are required to beg on the streets. In rare cases, the organs of human trafficking victims are harvested and sold on the black market, leading to a $1.2 billion black-market industry based on human suffering. Illegal organ harvesting targets the world’s most destitute people, with an estimated 10,000 illegal organ transplants taking place each year.

The problem of trafficking human organs is particularly bad in China, according to Medscape, where the illegal organ trade is so prolific that China has something of a reputation for being a destination for “transplant tourism.”

“The situation is equally complex and challenging in China, where a number of enterprises have been set up to facilitate transplant tourism. 99% of organs in China come from executed prisoners.”

Outside of China, the problem of illegal organ harvests persists largely due to law enforcement looking the other way at the trade.

“Similarly, kidney commerce is not legal in India, the Philippines, or Eastern European countries, yet the law enforcement agencies turn a blind eye to the flourishing underground organ trade.”

Back in Ukraine, Avakov says that he hopes the courts will impose the maximum sentence on the teacher accused of trying to sell a student to organ harvesters.

[Featured Image by Sanit Fuangnakhon/Shutterstock]