Serb prosecutor to travel to Albania after new evidence in the KLA organ trade case
Serbia's war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic said on Thursday he intended to travel to Albania to probe allegations that the Kosovo Albanian KLA guerillas had killed Serb prisoners and sold their organs
(KosovoCompromise Staff) Friday, October 24, 2008
Vukcevic said his office has asked Albanian prosecutors to look into the case and talks are under way to determine when he will go there himself.
Allegations of organ-trafficking involving Serbs killed during Kosovo's 1998-99 war first surfaced in a book by the former chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte.
In "The Hunt: War Criminals and Me," Del Ponte wrote that, according to her sources, between 100 and 300 mostly Serb civilians were transported by truck from Kosovo to a house near the Albanian town of Burrel, about 90 kilometers north of the capital, Tirana.
Kosovo guerillas killed the Serbs and doctors allegedly extracted the captives' internal organs, Del Ponte wrote.
The spokesman for the Serbian War Crimes Prosecutor's Office Bruno Vekaric said on Thursday that the Prosecutor's Office had received some evidence on trade with human organs two days ago and said that this was very important since it would help the investigation.
The question is whey the prosecutor's office did not receive this two or three years ago, he said.
"The entire world was informed about the plight of Kosovo Albanians during the bombing (in 1999), but few were those who were informed about the plight of Serbs after the end of the NATO intervention," Vekaric said during a visit to the Association of the Families of Kidnapped and Killed in Kosovo-Metohija in 1998-1999.
"This is why everybody in the state are responsible for conducting all investigations and sending a clear message primarily to those who had turned a ‘blind eye to Serb victims' that there is no difference in the serving of justice", Vekaric said.
He recalled that the so-called Orahovac Group had been prosecuted at the War Crimes Court, that Sinan Morina had been brought to justice and that warrants had been issued for the arrest of 160 members of the former KLA, but that there were problems in connection with the interviewing of Kosovo Albanian witnesses and those from Albania.
