A senior Nigerian politician is facing jail after he was found guilty on Thursday (March 23) of conspiring to transport a street trader to the United Kingdom as part of an organ-harvesting plot.

Ike Ekweremadu, 60, a district senator and lawyer, has been found guilty alongside his wife Beatrice, 56, and medical “middleman” Dr Obinna Obeta, 50 with conspiracy to arrange and/or facilitate travel of another person with a view to exploitation.

Prosecutors said the politician and his wife were behind the recruitment of the man at a Lagos street market, and that they arranged for the 21-year-old victim to provide a kidney to their 25-year-old daughter, Sonia, in an 80,000-pound transplant operation at a London hospital.

The victim, who was transported to London in February 2022, believed he was being taken to the capital for work, and that under the agreement he would be paid thousands of pounds, prosecutors said.

As part of the ploy, the victim was described as Sonia’s cousin in his UK visa application, and the Ekweremadus pretended to doctors that the young man was related to their daughter.

But a doctor at the Royal Free Hospital became suspicious about the circumstances surrounding the proposed operation and decided it could not go ahead.

Kidney donations are lawful in the UK, but it is a criminal offence to reward someone with money or other material advantage for doing so.

OFFICIAL INVESTIGATION LAUNCHED

The case came to light when the victim reported to British police that he had been trafficked from Nigeria and that someone was trying to transplant his kidney.

The victim told the court, he only knew about the organ donation plans after he underwent preliminary tests with private doctors at the Royal Free Hospital, in north London.

He then raised the alarm after he refused to give consent for the procedure to go ahead.

The victim later made official charges when he contacted the police at police station in Surrey, after running away from London.

The investigation was launched after detectives were alerted to potential offences under modern slavery legislation in May 2022.

As a result, the Ekweremadus were arrested June last year at London’s Heathrow airport after flying into London.

The verdict is the first to convict suspects of an organ-harvesting conspiracy under the UK’s Modern Slavery Act 2015.