They were a professional couple, the Karayevs. He, a professor in the Bukhara Technological Institute in Uzbekistan. She, a surgeon. And they had a sideline, a small travel company offering trips to the West for a remarkable $200 (£169).
But customers never got to the West. When police searched the Karayevs' flat earlier this year they found parts of six bodies, 60 passports, and $40,000 in cash. They don't know how many people the couple killed, only that most of the missing body parts made their way to south-east Asia, the grisly extreme of the growing trade in human organs that has become a multimillion dollar trade.
Over the next decade, heart, liver, and heart-lung transplantation procedures are likely to become standard in medical care. But in many countries the supply of organs is severely limited, sometimes by religious taboo. The needy go elsewhere.
In an ideal world, a US report on the body parts trade, by the Bellagio Task Force, suggests it might be acceptable to encourage donor programmes by rewarding donors with cash in the same way some countries pay blood or semen or egg donors. But that option is unacceptable today, the report concludes, painting a picture of a trade currently so distorted by corruption that its legalisation would only contribute to further pressures to abuse the system.
One committee member went so far as to talk of "the notion that we can eye each other greedily as a source of spare body parts" as "neo-cannibalism". Prof Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an anthropologist at the University of California, established a group, Organs Watch, to monitor the trade.
Among the abuses she personally bore witness to in the 1980s, in Argentinian and Brazilian morgues, were the bodies of dead kidnap victims who'd had organs removed. Such stories fuelled public fears that police and soldiers were murdering street children and other civilians to supply organs for officials of the military dictatorships and the rich.
In Argentina, between 1976-1991, at the state institute of mental health, Montes de Oca, where many "insane" political dissidents were sent, some 1,321 patients died under mysterious circumstances and another 1,400 patients disappeared. Years later, according to a report in the British Medical Journal, when some of the bodies were exhumed, it was found that their eyes and other body parts had been removed.
The judicial authorities discovered in January 1992 that at the same hospital there was a traffic in blood taken by force from patients and that assassination of the sick was practised for the use and sale of their organs, particularly their corneas.
Prof Scheper-Hughes accepts that the evidence this happened elsewhere on a widespread or systematic basis is inconclusive, and many doctors believe it is an "urban myth", but such has been the fear engendered in several South American countries that crowds have been known to attack strangers, accusing them of child-snatching for the purpose of organ removal.
Yet the German intelligence service last year said it had received reports of killings of street children by the Russian Mafia and subsequent shipments under false papers of organs to clinics in the West. Similar suggestions have come from the Italian police about Albanian traffickers.
What has been more authoritatively documented, however, is the flourishing trade in China in the organs of executed prisoners - the main source for transplant for rich foreign businessmen and party cadres. The Chinese admit the practice, but say it is small-scale and always with consent.
Not so, says Human Rights Watch. It quotes multiple Chinese sources describing the systematic harvesting of kidneys, corneas, liver tissue and heart valves, and claims that executions are even deliberately botched to postpone brain stem death and help the retrieval of organs while blood is still circulating.
Harry Wu, the Chinese human-rights activist, told a Berkeley conference that he "interviewed a doctor who routinely participated in removing kidneys from condemned prisoners. In one case she said, breaking down in the telling, she had even participated in a surgery in which both kidneys were removed from a living, anaesthetised prisoner late at night. The following morning the prisoner was executed by a bullet to the head".
The practice is a violation of the ethics codes of both the World Medical Association and the Transplantation Society.
Dr Lawrence Cohen, a co-founder of Organs Watch and a Berkeley lecturer, has reported from his own studies in southern India that "a kidney for a dowry" has caught on and become a fairly common strategy for poor families.
Reform was prompted by a series of scandals in the mid-1990s, not least the case of a Bangalore hospital whose doctors removed some 1,000 kidneys from patients without their permission. They were told they were in for routine operations or to give blood.
In a major investigation last year on the harvesting of body parts from the dead, the Californian newspaper Orange County Register reported that skin, tendons, heart valves, veins and corneas are valued at about $110,000. Add bone from the same body, and one body can be worth about $220,000.
