Police in Peru say that they’ve caught a group that was allegedly killing people and harvesting their fat to sell to Europeans who wanted it for cosmetics.

The Independent points out that human fat is readily available from liposuction, should anyone want it, and that it doesn’t really do anything special for your skin. Police however, maintain that they’ve busted just one of several “international criminal network[s] trafficking human fat”.

“We have broken up a criminal organisation dedicated to trafficking bodily fluids and human fat,” said local police commander Angel Toledo, on Thursday. The large containers of illicit fat were latter decanted into bottles for export, he added.

“Without a doubt [the gang] have committed various crimes like kidnapping and conspiring to commit criminal acts. [They] have spoken about how they committed crimes with the purpose of extracting their fat in rudimentary laboratories to later sell for the price of $15,000 (£9,000) per litre.”

Whether or not they were actually able to sell said fat to mysterious evil Europeans has not been established. It does seem however, that they were actually harvesting it.

Regardless of their commercial success, the gang seems, at the very least, to have perfected the art of fat-extraction. Two of Col Meija’s suspects, Serapio Marcos Veramendi and Enedina Estela were arrested at a bus stop in Huanuco province carrying soft-drink bottles filled with an amber liquidised substance that lab tests later showed was liquidised human fat.

The duo claim to have been en route to Lima, roughly 300 miles south, where the contents of the bottles were to be sold to intermediaries. A further six of their alleged accomplices, including two members of the Italian mafia, and the organisation’s alleged leader, Hilario Cudena, 56, remain at large.

Peruvian gang ‘killed peasant farmers for their fat’ [Independent]

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