Behind closed doors, they were cut open, the organs carved out for sale on the transplant market.

The grisly scene, which sounds more like the plot of a horror movie, took place in China more than 20 years ago at the direction of state authorities. It was witnessed by Bob (pseudonym), then a police officer who provided security at the execution sites where death-row prisoners were executed.

"The harvesting of death-row prisoners' organs was an open secret," Bob, a former public security officer from central China's Zhengzhou City who is now based in the United States, told The Epoch Times in an interview.

Bob described being an unwitting participant in an "industrialized" supply chain that converted living humans into products for sale in the organ trade. The players in this macabre industry include the judicial system, police, prisons, doctors, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials who issue the directive.

The former officer used a pseudonym in sharing his experience to protect his safety. The Epoch Times has verified his police ID and other personal information.

His account from the mid-1990s sheds light on one stage in the disturbing evolution of the CCP's long-running practice of harvesting organs from non-consenting donors. While Bob witnessed organ extraction from prisoners who were already dead, in the following years the regime would go on to implement—and deploy on a mass scale—a practice far more sinister: harvesting organs from live prisoners of conscience, particularly Falun Gong practitioners.