Samar, a former lab worker in Kazakhstan, details the CCP's organ harvesting system where she removed intestines from 20 daily bodies alongside a veterinarian. She describes poor ventilation, masked guards with AKs, and her own trauma of gang rape and sexual assault by a supervisor who labeled Kazakhs as a "terrorist state." After fleeing with less than $100, she left only an audio tape as evidence, exposing a facility operating without surveillance to process young victims for organs like kidneys and livers. This testimony reveals the brutal reality behind the alleged medical crimes. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Shocking Truth of Organ Harvesting00:03:04
What did you say was the single most shocking thing that you came across that was most shocking to you in your work?
We talk about victims a lot in organ harvesting, and that's appropriate.
We should be.
But the truth is, the strongest witness that you can come up with is somebody from the medical world who performs some sort of surgery or is in some way tangentially involved in this nexus of organ harvesting.
And in this case, the final witness in the sort of central chapter.
The sort of beating heart of the book, in a way, is called The Perfect 28, because 28 is the age they like to organ harvest, the Chinese like to organ harvest people.
Is a woman named Samar.
And it was an unusual interview because I don't encourage people to emote heavily in my interviews.
In fact, I sort of don't, I'm not a TV interview, okay?
And I'm not putting, that's nothing to do with what you do.
But you know the deal.
It says you have to get people to emote, they have to express it, you know, to show that they have scars.
This is where they burned me with the cigarettes.
I'm not doing that.
This is writing.
This is a book.
These people can't even be shown.
They're in great danger in Kazakhstan.
They usually have a very tenuous situation.
This woman comes in, says, I'm going to talk about something that I haven't talked about to anyone.
And then she bursts into tears.
Great heaving sobs.
I'm not just usual tears, sobs and sobs.
And I hand her the tissue box.
And after three minutes, she sort of calms down and then she starts telling this story.
At first, she's telling it in the third person.
She describes something a series of medical labs below a concentration camp.
Four stories down, and there's these well, three clinics, if you want to talk about it that way, and there's really a fourth one, which is sort of the first one you come to.
She describes these, she says, there's no surveillance down there, but there's two guards who stand there.
AKs at the low ready, totally masked.
You walk between them, and then there's the first gurney, and that's where she, and I figured it out fairly quickly, she's been there.
She's done this.
Her job, along with a veterinarian who pulled her in, so that's kind of higher, was to remove the intestines.
Now, normally you wouldn't even care about the intestines if you're dealing with a corpse.
It's not a Not essential to absolutely go after the intestines first, but if you're four stories down and your ventilation system is not that good, you might want to look into the intestines first, clean them, remove them, get rid of them.
Escape Through the Border at Night00:02:20
And in fact, they had had problems with this before.
The other three clinics were there to remove organs.
You couldn't see them, but occasionally the door would open, you'd see somebody handling a kidney.
A liver, and so forth.
Every day that she worked there, she wasn't in the camp, but every day that she worked there, there'd be eight or nine bodies.
Sometimes it was as many as 20, sometimes it would be three or four.
Almost always young.
To me, she was a central witness, in a word.
She brought it up to speed in a new time.
Now, What connects her into the rest of the book is that they also, while she was working there, at one point the guards got together and gang raped her.
What pulls it in again to the whole Uyghur experience of captivity is that the day before she left, ran away from this job, her supervisor put his hand into her pants as if he was assessing a piece of fruit, whether it was ripe or not, literally while he talked to her.
And she said, You can't do that.
And he said, Oh, you know all the rules, don't you?
Oh, you're so up on things.
You know everything.
You know what?
You're a Kazakh.
And Kazakhs are a terrorist state.
It's right here on our list.
Okay?
And we can do anything we want with you at any time.
In fact, get here at 7 tomorrow because I have something I want to talk to you about.
And that night she couldn't sleep.
And she made a dash for the border.
She left everything all her bank accounts, everything she had.
She came in with less than $100 in her pocket into Kazakhstan and was able to somehow get her way through the border in the middle of the night.
She'd only been there nine months when I got there.
You know, the BBC was very interested in pursuing this story.
But I have a feeling she just got returned to Kazakhstan, anyways.
I think the last thing I have is a tape of her voice.