Family claims 8-year-old British girl was killed for her organs in India

Eight-year-old Gurkiren Kaur Loyal was on her first-ever foreign trip to India — a family holiday to Punjab. It became the last trip of her lifetime.

The family says she was admitted to a clinic for a simple case of dehydration, and that staff there gave her a mystery injection that killed her. Gurkiren, from Hockley in Birmingham, died in India on April 2, 2013 — a death the Foreign Office confirmed. The Telegraph reported the family's account in May 2013.

The family's deeper claim is what made the story international news: they say that when her body was returned to Britain, a second post-mortem found that all her internal organs were missing — everything except her eyes. "The doctors in India didn't think that I would carry out a second post-mortem, but we did when we received the body in the UK. The coroner told us that there were no internal organs," her mother, Amrit Kaur Loyal, said. "India killed my daughter. She was perfectly healthy." The family believes she was murdered as part of an organ trade racket — a claim that, as of the reporting, was not independently established.

British councillor Narinder Kaur Kooner wrote to the Indian government asking that the organs be returned so the family could carry out a proper cremation: "Getting Gurkiren's organs back is the first priority."

India's Transplantation of Human Organs Act, 1994, bans commercial organ trade — a ban that has been on the books for two decades. But a law is only as strong as its enforcement, and India's history of organ-trafficking rackets shows how paper-true a ban can be. A little girl's family is still waiting for answers, and for her organs.