Have you ever heard of the human bone trade?
A foot bone can fetch hundreds of dollars, and a skull with teeth can cost even more, and India is the largest supplier to this market.
It's an even more terrifying place than Burma, where people don't even have bones left behind after death, and a skeleton is sold every eight minutes, no matter how much the Indian government prohibits it.
Where did these bones come from, and why did this trade keep going?
Human bone trading
In the summer of 2001, the police in Kolkata, India, received a report.
Some residents said they smelled the stench of corpses in the meat canning factory near their home, and they could see rows of bones of unidentified creatures drying in the distance.
Recently, even the sewers are filled with blood foam and meat scraps, and even the tap water in the faucets has a blood-red smell.
They suspect that it may be a human being who is causing the stench.
The Indian police who answered the phone were shocked.
After all, Kolkata is the third largest city in India, and if someone were to do such a thing in the city, it would definitely be a major and bad incident, so hundreds of police officers from the Public Security Bureau were collectively dispatched and drove dozens of police cars to surround the factory identified by the residents.
Then the Indian policeman kicked open the factory gate with a gun, and saw the creepy scene in front of him.
It turned out that in the wide workshop of the factory, horizontal and vertical, there were hundreds of clothes poles, and on each pole hung white flowers, some large and some small.
But with years of experience in handling cases, the police can see at a glance that these things are not simple!
Then they went inside, and found hundreds of cauldrons of boiling water, and all kinds of red and yellow spices floating on the surface of the water, and floating things could be faintly seen in the bubbles!
Due to the sudden arrival of the police, the people in the factory did not have time to escape, and they were all arrested with a gun to their heads.
At first, they thought it was a terrible incident, but after bringing the boss back for interrogation, they found out that behind it was the most terrible and darkest human bone trade in India!
"We are mainly responsible for providing customization to our guests. In the interrogation room, the owner of the factory calmly confessed to the police.
They are engaged in this kind of processing trade, which can customize products for customers from all over the world, and the main scope of business is mainly four - bone jewelry, medical specimens, psychic media and bone powder drugs.
Bone jewelry involves a wide range, mainly including necklaces, bracelets, earrings, handbags, and even hair bands and hair rings on the hair.
Most of these customers' purchase purposes are curiosity, or to show off to the people around them with bone jewelry, and it is also the type with the largest number of customer orders and the most widespread customer spread.
As for medical specimens, they are more often provided to medical schools and illegal profit-making organizations in European and American countries.
The change of people's concept of life and death is a long process, and many people are skeptical about body donation, which leads to a shortage of teachers in many places in the process of medical research.
Regular hospitals and medical schools will naturally cherish the use of teachers, but it is inevitable that some black-hearted research institutes are in greater demand, although the number of customer orders for this category is not high, but the income of each item is quite huge.
After all, some Western medical specimens have extremely high requirements for bones, which require them to be processed in advance with medical equipment.
And then there's the medium.
In the traditional concept of Southeast Asia and even some European countries, there is a natural worship of ghosts and gods or witchcraft, and they believe that these things can be channeled, and the magic objects made can obtain the right to communicate with the gods.
So they will also be processed into scepters, staffs, or magic weapons.
The last item is bone meal.
Compared with the first three, bone meal is processed and used in a variety of ways.
For example, bone meal may be used in medical cosmetology or bone filling, and regular hospitals will use a chemical similar to bone meal, but some black-hearted merchants will buy low-cost real bone meal from India in order to reduce costs.
Some will even package bone meal as a strange medicine that can cure all diseases, and then circulate it in a different packaging and way to the market.
According to the boss, in Kolkata and even in India as a whole, such an industry is commonplace, but now it is subject to the influence of its national policies, and most of it can only be carried out in private.
As far as he knew, a human bone was being sold every eight minutes, and in recent years the volume of transactions in various regions has reached $300 million.
This number shocked the police.
When asked where the corpses came from, the otherwise calm boss was momentarily stunned.
The wind doesn't stop
These sources are nothing more than donations through formal channels, purchases from the families of the deceased, grave digging, and abduction and killing of Indian civilians.
In the first way, although the channels are regular, the daily supply is very limited, and once the deceased signs an organ donation or body donation before his death, his body will be directly processed by the donation center or local medical institutions.
So initially, these Indian traffickers took the second way of buying from their families.
In many parts of India, where ordinary people are still unsustainable, and there is no money to bury their loved ones after they die, the corpse collectors will come to their homes and provide them with a decent payment.
In this way, these Indian family members were able to earn money and avoid more expenses, which spread in rural India for a while.
However, people don't die every day, the supply of corpses is too limited, and as their business grows bigger, it is clear that the supply is in short supply, so they start looking for new ways to find a way.
Of course, there is a more critical reason that when rural India knows that corpses can be sold for money, they will sit on the ground and raise the price of the entity, and even discharge 369 according to the time of death and physical health, which increases the cost of the corpse collector to a certain extent.
So the third method was derived - digging graves.
Graves should not be dug up indiscriminately, after all, many customers ask for fresh bones, and these Indian merchants have to find fresh bodies that have just been buried.
At first, these people squatted in several important cemeteries and cemeteries every day, but even this was not enough, and a considerable number of people could not afford to buy a cemetery, and did not even know where to hide their bodies.
So these Indian corpse collectors thought that it would be better to merge and cooperate in the industry, but whenever someone needs to be buried, they will know the news as soon as possible, and then follow behind the send-off procession, and then dig people out after they are buried.
Although this method can obtain fresh bones at zero cost, it also has a fatal flaw - it is a crime after being discovered.
At one time, residents of various Indian states reported to the local police that the bodies of their relatives had suddenly disappeared, and later the Indian government introduced a series of policies to protect human remains in order to quell public anger.
As for the fourth article of murder and kidnapping, there are many extremely bad manufacturers who do this, and their kidnapping targets are generally unarmed women and children.
However, this method does not dare to be used too much, otherwise it can easily attract the attention of the police.
What is the best way to do it?
Soon they thought of the Ganges.
According to the traditional Indian belief that the water of the Ganges can communicate with the heavens, and if a person lies in the Ganges after death, he can enter the Western Bliss.
Therefore, after many people pass away, they will ask their families to send their bodies to the Ganges.
According to statistics, thousands of corpses are salvaged from the Ganges every year, which gives these people an opportunity.
The bodies were first recovered, and after initial treatment, they were disinfected with spices and chemicals, and finally carved.
Due to the multiple procedures carried out in between, they can polish the bones so smooth that they don't even smell a single point, and even if they are put on the market, they can be mixed with other things and are unrecognizable.
So how did India have such a dark industry?
It all started with the British.
The British established colonial rule in India in the 18th century, just in time for the boom of modern anatomical medicine.
The human bone trade was the first to spread in the UK, and a large number of laboratories bought the remains for autopsy, which was also strongly opposed by the local people in the UK.
At that time, most people in the world still had the idea of dying peacefully, especially Catholics and Anglicans, who wanted the dignity of death, and they refused to collect corpses in Britain, so they proposed to the government.
In order to suppress public opinion, the government could only issue a decree prohibiting the purchase of corpses for manual processing.
After all, there is such a big gap in anatomical medical research, and there is still a need for a steady stream of corpses, and at this time the British colonists thought of India, which had a large population and poverty.
So they crossed the ocean to collect the corpses of the Indians.
At first, the price offered by the British side was very high, which made some Indians with low incomes feel that this industry was profitable, and slowly more and more people engaged in this industry, and such an underground industrial chain was formed.
Even after independence, the Indian government banned it, but it still persisted.
Part of the reason why human stock trading is so rampant is because it is profitable.
As the saying goes, money can make ghosts grind, such a zero-cost and high-profit industry, even if it is divided into capital punishment, I am afraid that there will be people who will go forward.
Part of the reason is that these stock trading chains are intertwined.
Like the boss in Kolkata, who was held in the police station for only two days, he was acquitted when questioned by the court.
The court held that there was no evidence to prove that his body was illegally gained, and that this argument was clearly far-fetched.
I don't know what you think about this?