India's human skeleton black market
Investigative journalist Scott Carney has been working for the last half a year or so on a story about grave robbers in Calcutta who steal skeletons and sell them to medical supply companies in the US and Europe.
"To research the story I combed the state of West Bengal and saw huge piles of police-confiscated bones," he explains. "I even spoke to some of the people who deflesh human bodies for a living."
The story is now out in Wired, and NPR News still more on Scott's blog.
Images here (shot by Scott): (left): A police officer in Burdwan, West Bengal, displays a cache of skulls confiscated from a bone factory run by Mukti Biswas on the outskirts of Kolkata. (right top): A bag of femurs recovered by West Bengal police. (right bottom): The gated entrance to Young Brothers in Kolkata. The company sells human remains at wholesale prices.
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I didn't realize this was news, it's been a well known practice for years. When I studied human osteology in college 13 years ago we didn't do a practical testing for racial characteristics on the class skeletons because it was well known that they had all come from India and that would skew our results because we knew what characteristics to look for.
I wonder if Marilyn Manson ever used this service?
http://www.holymoly.co.uk/news/28/marilyn-manson-sued-for-buying-human-remains-1955.html
"Manson is being sued by his former keyboard player Stephen Gregory Bier Jr., who hammered the ivories under the even more laughable name Madonna Wayne Gacy. Bier reckons that the singer wasted millions of the band's money on mentalist shopping, money which should have been shared between the musicians, according to their contracts.
The legal case started last August, when the keyboard player said that Manson squandered the group's income on "sick and disturbing" Nazi memorabilia. As opposed to that lovely, fluffy Nazi memorabilia that Laura Ashley based her empire upon, presumably.
Now Bier has lodged new papers with the court explaining that Manson spent thousands of dollars on the skeleton of a man in a wheelchair and African masks made out of human skin."
India also sells skulls and skeletons to Buddhist monasteries: Skulls Smuggled for Monks' Chalices.
What's the big deal? It's just a bunch of bones. There are too many bodies and coffins clogging up the earth, anyway.
Apparently, body parts and bones have also been illegally sold from New York funeral homes relatively recently, including those of the broadcaster Alistair Cooke.
What? No RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD reference yet?
Frank: International treaty, all skeletons come from India.
Freddy: No kidding, how come?
Frank: How the hell do I know how come? The important question is, where do they get all the skeletons with perfect teeth?