Israeli Corpse Fraud - Radio Islam

The Jerusalem Post, Internet News Article, December 28th, 2000:

Foreign experts to inspect country's sole forensic institute

By Judy Siegel

JERUSALEM (December 28) - The Health Ministry will invite foreign teams of expert forensic pathologists to examine the workings of the L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir in south Tel Aviv, the country's sole institution for the performance of autopsies in cases of unnatural death.

Ministry associate director-general Dr. Yitzhak Berlovich revealed this yesterday to The Jerusalem Post after the Hebrew-language daily Yediot Aharonot printed a "teaser" on its investigation of the institute to be published tomorrow.

Reporter Ronen Bergman maintains that the institute, headed for the last 13 years by chief pathologist Prof. Yehuda Hiss, is involved in "organ sales" involving body parts - legs, thighs, ovaries, breasts and testicles - removed from corpses and transferred to the institutes and for "practice" by medical school students.

He claimed that the organs removed from the bodies were not returned but replaced by "broomsticks, cotton wool, garden hoses" and other objects to fill out the bodies after autopsy. Hiss, the reporter wrote, filed reports that he was attending autopsies at the exact times that he claimed to have appeared in court.

Bergman also charged that the institute has carried out extensive renovations on staff quarters and the cafeteria, but that the autopsy rooms are in a rundown conditions "with flies in the air and poorly operating refrigerators."

Hiss said in an Israel Radio interview yesterday that only "specimens of tissue" were taken from corpses when outside experts were needed for an opinion, and not whole organs. However, when families of the deceased agree to donate bones and other organs not "harvested" in the hospital where he died, "filling materials" are used to make the body "esthetic" before burial, Hiss said. He also said that court hearings listed in the registry were sometimes postponed, and that he viewed corpses before and after autopsies performed by underlings, and did not have to be present throughout.

Berlovich said that he learned two years ago that the institute at Abu Kabir was removing organs from corpses and sending them to research institutes and medical schools, taking a "fee" for the service that was then transferred to the ministry.

"When I found out, I immediately gave an order that this be stopped. To the best of my knowledge, this practice has not continued," but Berlovich conceded that it was "difficult to supervise the institute, as it is the only one in the country to conduct autopsies; if we wanted to send local forensic medicine specialists to observe Abu Kabir, we couldn't, because all the experts in the country are there." If any organs are in fact being removed from an unidentified person without the family's written permission, this is a criminal violation." Because of the limited number of people who donated their bodies to science for doctors and medical students to practice on, the Health and Justice ministries have just agreed on new regulations that would allow controlled removal of organs for such a purpose, he disclosed.

The ministry may consider opening another forensic medicine institute in the North or South to institute some kind of competition, Berlovich said, but it already decided a few days ago to hire foreign experts to study the situation at Abu Kabir and make recommendations.

"It was not because of the Yediot article," he maintained, "but because every few months there are stories in the papers about things they claim are going on there." The associate director-general said the ministry has "complete confidence" in Hiss and "no intention of replacing him."

"The institute was neglected for many years due to minimal state budgets, and when we recently received a closing order from the Labor Ministry due to substandard conditions, we pressed the Internal Security Ministry - whose Israel Police is the main client for autopsy results - for funding. That ministry will finance half of the NIS 8 million now available, and the renovations should be completed in a year or two," Berlovich said.

As for renovations of institute offices, Berlovich said that since only a small amount of funds had been provided each year, it was invested in building showers and renovating pathologists' and his own offices, as well as the staff cafeteria, because nearly NIS 10 million were needed to rebuild the autopsy facilities.

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