The killing of persecuted groups in Chinese military hospitals so that their organs can be harvested for sale may still be continuing, a former politician who investigated the issue said.

Last year a report exposed that China was not only harvesting organs from prisoners on death row but also adherents of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, many of whom were detained without trial.

The investigation caused international outrage and prompted assurances from China's transplant industry that foreign visitors would not be sold organs that had come from an executed person.

However report author and former Canadian Secretary of State David Kilgour told a conference at Cambridge University last Tuesday that he believed the tainted organs were still being sold to rich Chinese.

He said: "The party-state in China and its agencies have killed thousands of Falun Gong practitioners, without any form of prior trial, and then sold their vital organs for large sums of money, often to 'organ tourists' from wealthy countries

"The Chinese Medical Association recently agreed with the World Medical Association that 'organ tourists' can no longer obtain transplants in China.

"Whether this is anything more than public relations, intended to benefit the Olympics, remains to be seen.

"Another concern is that organs seized from Falun Gong practitioners will now go to wealthy Chinese patients instead, with the hideous commerce thus continuing in the same volumes."

The report cites 41,500 unexplained organ transplants from 2000 to 2005 that do not come from convicted executed prisoners, the brain-dead or family donors.

The report suggests that the organs come from adherents of Falun Gong—a non-political spiritual movement whose principles are truthfulness, compassion and tolerance which was banned in 1999.

There are believed to be at least a million practitioners in labour camps across the country. According to U.N. Special Rapporteur Manfred Novak, Falun Gong practitioners are the victims of two-thirds of all torture cases in China.

According to sources inside China, as recently as Christmas Eve last year surgeons at the Second Hospital Affiliated with Harbin Medical University performed a heart transplant operation using organs believed to be from an executed donor. It is not clear whether in this case the "donor" was a Falun Gong practitioner.

Kilgour said: "Human lives across China appear to have no more value to the Party than does the natural environment, work safety or health care. In my judgement, it is the toxic combination of totalitarian governance and 'anything is permitted' capitalism that allows this new form of evil in the world to persist."

Speaking in a conference with report co-author and human rights lawyer David Matas, Kilgour likened the 2008 Beijing Olympics to the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany.

However he said that in many cases conditions in China now are already worse than those in 1936, including what he likens to a campaign of genocide against Falun Gong.

He said: "The propaganda phase, begun in mid-1999 against a then estimated 70-100 million Falun Gong practitioners across China, demonized, vilified and dehumanized them in Party-controlled media. Many Chinese were thus persuaded to think of the community as even somehow less than human. It recalls a similar media campaign unleashed by a regime in Rwanda against its minority Tutsi community prior to the genocide there between April and June, 1994."