Meet Turkey's "Dr. Frankenstein"

The New York Times has a fascinating story today about Yusuf Sonmez, a Turkish surgeon who is suspected of being part of an organ transplant ring that stretches from Turkey to the Balkans and which may even involve the Prime Minister of Kosovo. From the piece:

For a surgeon wanted by Interpol and suspected of harvesting human organs for an international black-market trafficking ring, Yusef Sonmez, was remarkably relaxed as he sipped Turkish red wine in a bustling kebab restaurant facing the wind-whipped Sea of Marmara.

Dr. Sonmez, refreshed from a ski trip to Austria, spoke last month while on a break from business trips to Israel and operations on cancer patients here.

He boasts about the satisfaction of his kidney transplant surgeries, more than 2,400 by his count. He keeps friends (and, incidentally, investigators) up to date on his life via a blog and his Web site listing contact details. And in his seaside villa on the Asian side of Istanbul, he treasures a framed copy of a signed letter in 2003 from the Ministry of Health in Israel commending him for his life-saving aid to “hundreds of Israeli patients who are suffering from kidney diseases and awaiting transplants.”

Yet Interpol is circulating an international red-alert notice for the Turkish surgeon’s arrest with a mug shot of him in a surgical scrub cap. The Turkish authorities have shut down his private hospital. The local press has labeled him “Dr. Frankenstein.” And an expert who monitors the lurid and lucrative global trade in human organs says Dr. Sonmez has been arrested at least six times in Turkey.

“There are two Yusufs, one my family and friends know and the one created in the press who is a monster— this is a drama, a tragedy,” said Dr. Sonmez, 53, a trim, angular man with intense, gray-green eyes and a graying goatee. “Up to now, I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t harm anybody, counting donors or recipients. I have not committed any kind of social harm to anyone. This is the main thing that I am proud of.”

Of his surgical skills, he added, wryly, “I am the best in the world as long as my fingers aren’t broken.”