War crimes prosecution launched in case of sale of organs of kidnapped Kosovo Serbs
Serbia’s war crimes prosecution announced it has opened a case on the sale of organs of the Kosovo Serbs who went missing during and after the 1999 NATO bombings.
(KosovoCompromise Staff) Thursday, March 27, 2008
The investigating judge of the Council for War Crimes of the Belgrade District Court will question several persons and collect possible available documentation within the pre-trial procedure concerning allegations about the sale of the organs of Kosovo Serbs.
Former Hague Tribual war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte revealed in her book "Hunt - Me and War Criminals" that the Hague prosecution had found out, while investigating the crimes the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army 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.
Del Ponte's former spokesman Florence Hartmann, meantime, accused Unmik of having refused on several occasions to cooperate with the prosecutor in the case of the trade of organs.
This claim was rejected by Unmik spokesman Alexander Ivanko.
