Families of kidnapped Kosovo Serbs to sue Del Ponte
The association of kidnapped and missing Kosovo Serbs has announced it will file a lawsuit against former ICTY war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte after she revealed in her new book, to be published in April in Italy, that she was aware of the fate of their kin.
(KosovoCompromise Staff) Monday, March 24, 2008
"In 2004, Del Ponte told us in The Hague that she had information that all Serbs kidnapped in Kosovo were later murdered, but she kept silent about her knowledge that before they died, their organs were removed," the association president Simo Simić said.
"Del Ponte hid the truth and left this information about the grave crimes committed against the kidnapped Serbs out, in this way helping the crime, although she received the list of names of those kidnapped and those who kidnapped them in 2001. She never arrested anyone and she must answer for this," Spasić said.
"Del Ponte needs to explain why there were no convictions of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) leaders and why she never stopped it, the removal of organs from our loved ones, when she had information from many sources, Deutsche Welle, Sky News, BBC journalists, who said KLA was securing the transport of the kidnapped Kosovo Serbs to Albania," Spasić continued.
Del Ponte reveals in her book "Hunt - Me and War Criminals" that the Hague prosecution had found out, while investigating the crimes the KLA had committed against Serbs, Roma and other ethnic communities in 1999, that two persons, that had gone missing in the clashes in Kosovo, had been used in an organ smuggling operation.
The KLA was at the time led by the current Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaqi, as well as by the two previous prime ministers Agim Ceku and Ramush Haradinaj, who is already on trial in The Hague.
The Tribunal's investigators and UNMIK officials received the information from reliable journalists who found out that in the summer of 1999, Kosovo Albanians had put more than 300 kidnapped persons in trucks and transported them across the border to the northern part of Albania.
