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Report Says Kosovo Prime Minister Led Organ Trafficking Network

16 December 2010 03:09 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. A two-year international inquiry has concluded that the prime minister of Kosovo led a clan of criminal entrepreneurs who presided over an organ-trafficking network that extracted kidneys from Serbian prisoners executed during the Kosovo conflict in 1999, APA reports quoting â€œThe New York Timesâ€.
The inquiry, prepared for the Council of Europe, a 47-nation group that deals with issues of human rights, named the prime minister, Hashim Thaci, 42, the former political leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, as the head of the Drenica Group, an organized criminal network that flourished in Kosovo and Albania after the war and exerted control over the heroin and narcotics trade and six secret detention centers for a black market in human kidneys.
Kosovo has denounced the findings of the inquiry, which began to leak out late Tuesday ahead of the official release on Thursday. One Kosovo official called it slanderous and an effort to harm Mr. Thaci, whose party this month won the nationâ€™s first election since it declared independence from Serbia.
Accusations of organ trafficking in Kosovo are not new, but the links to Kosovoâ€™s highest elected official have focused new attention on the issue.
The roots of the organ trafficking network date to 1999 as the Kosovo conflict was ending. Over time, the report said, the ring established ties to â€œa broader, more complex organized criminal conspiracyâ€ that operated in three other countries and endured for more then a decade.
The report was prepared by Dick Marty, a Swiss politician who previously has investigated accusations that the Central Intelligence Agency abducted and imprisoned terrorism suspects in Europe, and relied on the testimony of people who provided logistics for the ring, driving captives in unmarked vans between a series of way stations in Albania.
That shadowy network faced new scrutiny this week, with the start of a trial in Pristina, the Kosovo capital, to prosecute seven men, including a former senior health ministry official. They are accused of recruiting 20 people from impoverished nations with promises of payments for their kidneys, which in turn were sold to recipients for $110,000 to $137,000.
The report was commissioned in response to accusations about organ trafficking in a 2008 memoir by Carla del Ponte, the former prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, a United Nations body that pursued war crimes suspects. Her book, â€œThe Hunt,â€ which was published in Italian, claimed that Kosovo Albanians smuggled organs of kidnapped Serbs after the war ended in 1999. While a prosecutor, Ms. del Ponte, now a Swiss ambassador to Argentina, did not submit evidence of organ trafficking to the tribunalâ€™s judges, constrained by rules that the court could only pursue war crimes committed up until June 1999 and that it lacked jurisdiction in Albania.
Investigators for the council criticized foreign governments as ignoring what was happening. They also noted that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia conducted initial examinations of the trafficking, but dropped the investigation and later destroyed some evidence. â€œThe international actors chose to turn a blind eye to the war crimes of the Kosovo Liberation Army, placing a premium instead on achieving some degree of short-term stability,â€ Mr. Marty wrote. Witnesses have been intimidated and killed, according to the report.
The trafficking, according to the report, evolved over time and consisted of detention centers spread through Albania that were controlled by the Kosovo Liberation Army. The military detention facilities changed in character to private residences, including Albanian farmhouses and storage barns and ultimately a makeshift operating clinic where organs were shipped out of Albania and sold to private overseas clinics.
Initially the captives were Serb prisoners, but the ring also kidnapped ethnic Albanians to settle old scores, the report said. Captives, according to the report, were â€œfilteredâ€ for their suitability, based on sex, age, health and ethnic origin. The final destination was a two-story farmhouse in Fushe Kruje in the west of Albania, which was close to the airport hub serving Tirana and where the â€œfilteringâ€ and blood testing took place. Some of the guards told investigators that a few captives figured out their fate and â€œpleaded with their captors to be spared the fate of being chopped into pieces.â€
Captives, according to the report, were then killed â€” usually by a gunshot to the head â€” before their organs were removed. â€œWhen the transplant surgeons were confirmed to be in position and ready to operate, the captives were brought out of the â€˜safe houseâ€™ individually, summarily executed by a K.L.A. gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic.â€
Mr. Marty called for increased resources and an investigation to find out what actually happened at the detention centers. Part of the problem, the report noted, is that after the war international authorities tended to regard Kosovar Albanians as innocent victims and the Serbs as â€œevil oppressors.â€
â€œThere cannot and must not be one justice for the winners and another for the losers,â€ Mr. Marty wrote.
In Belgrade, Serbian prosecutors hailed the report as a â€œvictory that returned hope to the families of kidnapped or missing victims.â€
On Thursday, the report will be formally submitted to a legal affairs committee for the Council of Europe parliamentary assembly, which is responsible for electing the judges of the European Court of Human Rights. The report will then be debated in the parliamentary assembly in Strasbourg on Jan. 25.