Fat for Sale – Peruvuan Gangsters Kill Farmers for Their Fat
A morbidly bizarre case has unfolded in Peru involving members of a gang who kidnapped and killed local farmers in order to drain the fat from their bodies and sell it for cosmetic purposes.
Hoping to make some quick money from European cosmetic brokers, the three gang members were arrested by Lima police officers with bottles of liquefied human fat found on them. Peru’s chief police office, General Felix Burga, has evidence that leads him to believe that this gang was one of several operating within the country hoping to export the product for use Italy. Members of the Italian mafia have also been implicated in the crime ring and are still at large.
Â
The three men have confessed to killing five people by luring them into a remote building in the jungle and killing them before dismembering the bodies and draining the fat. The headless bodies were hung in the building with candles lit underneath them to cause the fat to melt and drop into containers.
The men believed that they could traffic the body fluids on the black market and make as much as 15,000 USD per litre by selling it for use in skin rejuvenating skin creams. In addition to the five murders already confessed to, police suspect the men in at least a dozen more killings. Col Jorge Meija, the chief of Peru’s anti-kidnapping police listed the charges against the suspects as kidnapping, homicide, and illegal firearm possession.
Experts in the cosmetic industry dispute the projected profit the men expected to make. Dr. Lisa Donofrio, a dermatology professor at Yale University in the United States said that although a small market might exist for human fat extract, it is not something that scientifically is a viable way of keeping skin supple. If there was merit to the use of human fat cells for cosmetic purposes, cosmetic surgery clinics all over the world have a surplus of the material left over and readily available from liposuction procedures.
The strangest part of the story rests in who the gangsters expected to sell their product to. There is no shortage of strange products on the cosmetics market, but this is simply not a needed ingredient in the creation of skin creams.
