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THREE animal rights activists were jailed for 12 years each and a fourth imprisoned for four years for a terror campaign against an English guinea pig farm that culminated in a grave robbing. John Ablewhite, Kerry Whitburn and John Smith were today each handed 12-year prison terms at Nottingham Crown Court in central England after pleading guilty to a charge of conspiring to blackmail the farm owners. Josephine Mayo was jailed for four years after admitting a lesser part in the six-year campaign against the Hall family who own a farm in Staffordshire, central England, which bred the rodents for...

LONDON, May 4 (UPI) -- Animal rights activists stole the remains of a woman who once operated a guinea pig breeding farm, British police said. The remains of Gladys Hammond, 82, were discovered Tuesday in Cannock Chase, Staffordshire. They had been stolen from the grave two years ago, Sky News reported. A police spokesman said a pathologist had examined the remains. "Although further DNA tests have still be carried out to confirm identity," said the spokesman, "detectives are satisfied that the body recovered is that of Gladys Hammond." Hammond's body was taken from St Peter's churchyard in Yoxall, Staffordshire, in...

Shocking body parts investigation (X-ray shows PVC piping) (Cathy Orosz, WROC-TV)Tonight four people face criminal charges, including the head of Bio-Medical Tissue Services, a downstate company that harvested human tissue and organs for transplants. 8 local funeral homes and 3 area hospitals are also tied to the investigation. Very graphic and gruesome details unveiled here Thursday by the Kings County district attorney. The shocking local link is that more local funeral homes did business with BTS than previously thought. Over the course of four years, investigators say body parts were harvested from 1,077 corpses without knowledge of family members and...

When it comes to the body, they say you can't take it with you when you die. But they didn't say it should be sold from the back of a truck. Or that you should not have the right to give a fully informed consent for whatever it is that medical science wants to do with your remains. Recently it was revealed that a group of criminals was stealing bones from bodies at crematoriums in New York. They were then sold to for-profit tissue banks in New Jersey and Florida. Among the victims was the late host of PBS television's...

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Monday announced that he is proposing legislation that would regulate tissue transplants and donations, Long Island Newsday reports. The majority of tissue now comes from hospitals, though it is not illegal for funeral homes to sell tissue (Ochs, Long Island Newsday, 1/24). However, Schumer's legislation would make it illegal for tissue banks to purchase tissue, bone and muscle from funeral homes or morgues, with exceptions for types of tissue in short supply. Schumer also would tighten FDA oversight by requiring the agency to make unannounced visits to tissue banks at least once a year (Livingston,...

Patricia Battisti had thought her back surgery in early 2005 was routine. A letter from her hospital nearly a year later made it clear she was wrong. Battisti was informed that the cadaver bone that was implanted in her back may have been infected with various viruses -- the result of what investigators say was a large-scale scheme in which corpses were cut up and body parts illegally sold.

Stolen Human Tissue Stolen human tissue ends up in several mountain patients who went into the hospital for surgery. The material was stolen from funeral homes in New York that removed bone and tissue from corpses without getting permission from families. Now hospitals around the state are looking into whether any of their patients got the stolen tissue. Officials at Mission Hospitals say 16 patients may have received some of the stolen tissue. They believe that although the tissue may have been stolen it was still sterilized and tested for infectious diseases. Mission Hospitals' Dr. Dale Fell says patients were...

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Human tissue stolen from funeral homes in New York may have been implanted in at least 26 patients of four Charlotte-area hospitals. None of the patients appears to have been harmed. Officials at Carolinas Medical Center and Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte and Catawba Valley Medical Center in Hickory say they notified doctors and patients after learning patients received bone and other tissue. The tissue came from companies that bought material from Biomedical Tissue Services of New Jersey. Biomedical is under investigation for allegedly removing bone and tissue from corpses without permission from families and selling them for...

Michael Bruno's life had been uncomplicated: He was an immigrant who worked hard, spoke his mind and succumbed to kidney cancer two years ago at 75. "Typical Italian cab driver," recalled his son, Vito. "He had an opinion about everything." It's only after death that his story became ghoulish. Authorities believe his body and those of hundreds of other people — including famed British broadcaster Alistair Cooke — were secretly carved up in the back rooms of several funeral parlors citywide to remove human bone, skin and tendons without required permission from their families. Authorities allege the body parts were...

Relatives of Alistair Cooke, the late broadcaster, have spoken of their revulsion after it was found that his bones were cut from his body by a criminal gang and sold for transplant tissue. New York police said his body was one of dozens chopped up for profit by rogue morticians in Brooklyn. After presenting BBC radio's Letter from America for more than half a century, Cooke died in March last year of lung cancer, aged 95. The "body-snatchers", as the New York tabloids call them, surgically carved out his bones the day after he died, said the Daily News. His...

A fiendish team of body snatchers in Brooklyn defiled the body of beloved "Masterpiece Theater" host Alistair Cooke, removing his bones for profit without his family's permission.......the body of the avuncular TV icon, who died in March 2004 at 95, was cremated at New York Mortuary in Spanish Harlem — but not before a pair of heartless harvesters got their hands on him. Cooke, who hosted the PBS anthology series of British programs from 1971 to 1993, was among dozens of victims whose bodies were sawed up and peddled by funeral director Joseph Nicelli and disgraced dentist Michael Mastromarino, cops...

Vt. Teen Accused of Stealing Corpse's Head By Associated Press April 13, 2005, 8:01 AM EDT MORRISVILLE, Vt. -- A 17-year-old Morrisville youth was being held on $100,000 bail after police said he raided a tomb in a cemetery and removed a head from a corpse. "We had a person voice their concerns about information they had heard on the street," said Chief Richard Keith of the Morristown Police Department. Keith said police at first could not believe what they had heard. But when they went to Morrisville Cemetery and investigated, they found that someone had broken into a tomb,...