A senior French surgeon faces legal action after attempting to sell the X-ray of someone shot at the 2015 Bataclan music hall shooting as an NFT.
Emmanuel Masmejean, a surgeon who operates in southwest Paris, was attempting to sell the X-ray on the NFT marketplace OpenSea for $2776. The X-ray featured a forearm with a Kalashnikov bullet still embedded in it, although the victim is not identifiable.
“This act is contrary to sound professional practice, puts medical secrecy in danger, and goes against the values of [Paris hospitals] and public service,” Martin Hirsch, the head of Paris’s public hospitals, wrote in a letter to staff that he shared on Twitter.
BITCOIN WORTH LESS THAN HALF WHAT IT WAS IN OCTOBER AS MARKETS DROP
A surgeon in Paris selling his X-ray radio from her patient who lost her boyfriend in the Bataclan terrorist attack. People are shameless.https://t.co/LVMpFRx2In pic.twitter.com/z78FsVpfOl
— Julien Bouteloup – bneiluj.eth (@bneiluj) January 23, 2022
Hirsch told the French news outlet Mediapart that Masmejean would face criminal and professional complaints over his “disgraceful” and “scandalous” decision.
When asked for comment, Masmejean claimed that the sale was “an error,” and he regretted not seeking permission from the patient.
According to the OpenSea listing, which has been removed, the unidentified patient was a young woman whose boyfriend was killed in the Bataclan attack. The woman “had an open fracture of the left forearm with a remaining bullet of Kalashnikov in soft tissues,” according to the listing.
“This doctor, not content with breaking the duty of medical secrecy towards this patient, thought it would be a good idea to describe the private life of this young woman, making her perfectly identifiable,” the patient’s lawyer said in a statement. The woman has requested to stay anonymous.
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NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, became immensely popular in 2021, selling for millions of dollars on the cryptocurrency market. Most NFTs are images or objects that are uniquely coded within a blockchain to allow the purchaser to own a unique copy of the image.
The Bataclan shooting was one of several coordinated Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015. The attackers killed 130 people, including 90 at the Bataclan theatre. The Islamic State took responsibility for the killings, claiming that they retaliated in response to French airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria.
