The girl was
living at a boarding school in the Kharkiv region for orphans and children from
broken homes.
Ukrainian Interior
Minister Arsen Avakov reported the case on Facebook, with photos of the
52-year-old teacher and girl. He said police had been monitoring them for four
months.
Mr Avakov said the
buyer hinted that the girl's organs would be removed. The buyer inquired
about the girl's health and paid the teacher 1,000 hryvnia (£31; $39) for
photos of the girl and her medical records, Mr Avakov said.
Ukrainian media
have named the suspect as Galina Kovalenko. She teaches the Ukrainian and
Russian languages, and literature, and has more than 20 years' teaching
experience, they report.
There has been no
statement yet from the teacher.
Mr Avakov said "Galina (Kovalenko) worked for nearly a year on her 'business plan' for selling the
13-year-old girl", whom she had singled out as vulnerable.
"They
got this seller 'red-handed' - when she took the girl out of the boarding
school, brought her to the buyers and received money," Mr Avakov said.
If
found guilty, the teacher could be jailed for up to 12 years. Mr Avakov is
personally handling the case.
There
have been previous reports of criminal gangs preying on destitute people in
eastern Europe to harvest their organs. The trade in organs can be highly
lucrative.
In
2013, an EU-led court in Kosovo found five people guilty in connection with a
human organ-trafficking ring. The five were accused of carrying out dozens of
illegal transplants at the Medicus Clinic in the capital, Pristina.
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