Calling it a crime against humanity, a new report says China is harvesting vital organs from devotees of the outlawed Falun Gong movement.

Hearts, kidneys, livers and corneas are removed from executed practitioners of the meditative regimen and sold for transplantation at hefty prices, sometimes to foreigners, concludes the report.

Winnipeg human rights lawyer David Matas and former Liberal cabinet minister David Kilgour, who undertook a two-month investigation, acknowledged yesterday their findings were almost too astonishing to comprehend.

"The very horror makes us reel back in disbelief," the report says. "But that disbelief does not mean that the allegations are untrue."

Kilgour, former secretary of state for the Asia-Pacific region, said Canadians are among those who have travelled to China for illicit organs.

The pair conducted the probe as unpaid volunteers at the request of the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, a Washington-based organization with a branch in Ottawa.

The Chinese embassy in Ottawa dismissed the report as a "groundless and biased" Falun Gong smear effort.

Kilgour and Matas insist their research was conducted independently of the coalition. They were unsuccessful in obtaining visas to visit China. Instead, they gathered testimony from witnesses in Canada, the United States, France and Australia, consulted websites of Chinese transplantation centres, and studied transcripts of Mandarin conversations with doctors at hospitals and detention centres in China.

Supporters say Beijing, seeing Falun Gong as a threat, has ordered thousands of followers detained and hundreds killed.

In March, China enacted legislation to ban human organ sales.

The report says figures indicate about 60,000 transplants occurred in China from 2000 to 2005. Of these, an estimated 18,500 would have come from legitimate sources, the report adds, leaving 41,500 unexplained transplants.

It cites the testimony from the ex-wife of a surgeon who said he confessed to her that he removed the corneas from 2,000 Falun Gong prisoners in 2002 and 2003.

The report also notes a number of family members of Falun Gong practitioners who died in detention reported seeing the corpses of their loved ones with surgical incisions and body parts missing.

The authors say as recently as April, the website of the China International Transplantation Network Assistance Centre listed the following organ prices in U.S. dollars: cornea $30,000, kidney $62,000, liver $98,000 to $130,000, heart $130,000 to $160,000.