Ethan Gutmann, in the Weekly Standard, delivers a gruesome look at one of the world’s greatest atrocities occurring during the last two decades, China’s harvesting of organs from sometimes-still-living condemned prisoners.

In 1989, not long after Nijat Abdureyimu turned 20, he graduated from Xinjiang Police School and was assigned to a special police force, Regiment No. 1 of the Urumqi Public Security Bureau. As one of the first Uighurs in a Chinese unit that specialized in “social security”—essentially squelching threats to the party—Nijat was employed as the good cop in Uighur interrogations, particularly the high-profile cases. I first met Nijat—thin, depressed, and watchful—in a crowded refugee camp on the outskirts of Rome.

Nijat explained to me that he was well aware that his Chinese colleagues kept him under constant surveillance. But Nijat presented the image they liked: the little brother with the guileless smile. By 1994 he had penetrated all of the government’s secret bastions: the detention center, its interrogation rooms, and the killing grounds. Along the way, he had witnessed his fair share of torture, executions, even a rape. So his curiosity was in the nature of professional interest when he questioned one of the Chinese cops who came back from an execution shaking his head. According to his colleague, it had been a normal procedure—the unwanted bodies kicked into a trench, the useful corpses hoisted into the harvesting vans, but then he heard something coming from a van, like a man screaming.

“Like someone was still alive?” Nijat remembers asking. “What kind of screams?”

“Like from hell.”

Nijat shrugged. The regiment had more than enough sloppiness to go around.

A few months later, three death row prisoners were being transported from detention to execution. Nijat had become friendly with one in particular, a very young man. As Nijat walked alongside, the young man turned to Nijat with eyes like saucers: “Why did you inject me?”

Nijat hadn’t injected him; the medical director had. But the director and some legal officials were watching the exchange, so Nijat lied smoothly: “It’s so you won’t feel much pain when they shoot you.”

The young man smiled faintly, and Nijat, sensing that he would never quite forget that look, waited until the execution was over to ask the medical director: “Why did you inject him?”

“Nijat, if you can transfer to some other section, then go as soon as possible.”

“What do you mean? Doctor, exactly what kind of medicine did you inject him with?”

“Nijat, do you have any beliefs?”

“Yes. Do you?”

“It was an anticoagulant, Nijat. And maybe we are all going to hell.”

Read the whole thing.

Sky News reports:

Mobile execution buses being used by the Chinese government…

Dominic Waghorn found that between 3,500 and 10,000 people are put to death each year.

The volume of executions has meant that China has invented new ways of killing, mobilizing and mechanizing its execution system.

Brochure shows execution buses A brochure acquired by Sky News reveals details of China’s new execution buses now operating across the country.

Fitted with lethal injection equipment they can deliver on the spot executions.

Sky News spoke to a number of people affected by the executions including the family of Nie Shubin who was only 20-years-old when he was wrongly accused of rape and murder.

His mother and sister told how he was held in jail for three years, without being allowed to see his family once.

Sky’s Dominic Waghorn Nie Shuie said: “They never let me see him after his arrest. That continued till the end. I never saw him again before he was executed.

“And nobody told us that he had been executed.”

Nie was accused of attacking a woman in a field near his home, but only after his execution did another man confess to the attack.

In an exclusive report earlier this year, Sky News gathered evidence linking China’s execution system and its booming organ transplant industry.

Amnesty International says the demand for transplant organs may be driving the high number of executions in China.

Even by official figures more people are executed every year in China than the rest of the world put together.