Williamson has large dossier on KLA crimes

Clint Williamson, the head of Eulex's special investigation team, has a large dossier on crimes committed by the former "Kosovo Liberation Army" (KLA) and is expected to hand it over to the judges of a special court that will look into the findings of the former Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe rapporteur Dick Marty, the Pristina-based Express daily has reported.

(kosovocompromisestuff) Wednesday, April 16, 2014

The US prosecutor's dossier contains the names of 120 former leaders of the KLA (an ethnic Albanian paramilitary formation), who are expected to be charged in connection with the disappearance of 320 Serbs in the Orahovac and Drenica areas and the Metohija region, the paper's sources said.Express reported that all suspects are expected to be arrested once the legal conditions for establishing the tribunal have been met.Most of the names are those of wartime commanders of the KLA from Drenica and Metohija, but the dossier also includes people who operated in northern Albania, near Kosovo, the Pristina paper reported on Monday.For almost four years now, Williamson's team has been investigating the allegations from Marty's report, which describes crimes by the self-styled KLA against Serbs, Roma and "disloyal" ethnic Albanians after the withdrawal of Serbian military and police forces from Kosovo in 1999.Allegations of an organ harvesting operation run in the so-called Yellow House, some 20 km from Burrel, central Albania, sparked the most attention.The organs were allegedly extracted from kidnapped civilians and subsequently sold on the black market.In an interview with the Radio Television of Kosovo, Eulex mission head Bernd Borchardt said yesterday that forming a special court to investigate war crimes is a necessity because it must be established whether the court can dismiss or uphold Dick Marty's allegations of organs having been extracted from Serb civilians for trafficking.Setting up the court would demonstrate that Kosovo and its leadership are not afraid of such a court, which would also contribute to positive signals from the EU, he said.The move is not targeting individual KLA commanders, but persons suspected of specific acts, Borchardt said.