Kosovars reject organs trade claim

KOSOVO:SENIOR FIGURES in Kosovo and Albania have angrily rejected allegations by former chief UN war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte that hundreds of Serb and other civilians were murdered for their organs at the end of the 1998-9 Kosovo war.

Ms del Ponte, who is now Switzerland's ambassador to Argentina after leaving her post at The Hague tribunal last year, wrote in her memoirs that the abduction and murder of the victims and the sale of their body parts, could only have taken place with the knowledge of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and the Albanian secret service.

Many former senior KLA members are now powerful political and business figures in Kosovo, including prime minister Hashim Thaci, who declared his homeland's independence from Serbia in February, with the support of most major western countries.

Ms del Ponte writes that up to 300 young Serbs and other Slavs, both men and women, were taken by truck from Kosovo to neighbouring Albania, where they were held captive and had their organs removed, before being killed and buried.

Citing "reliable journalists" and members of the UN mission that has run Kosovo since 1999, Ms del Ponte claims the organs were flown from Albania through the airport outside its capital, Tirana, to foreign clinics where patients had paid for a transplant.

"Leaders of an intermediate and high level of the KLA were well-informed and were implicated in an active way in the smuggling of the organs," she says in her book The Hunt: Me and War Criminals, which has so far been published only in Italy.

New York-based Human Rights Watch has sent a letter to Mr Thaci urging him to investigate the allegations.

The rights group refers to claims in Ms del Ponte's book that some younger, healthier prisoners taken by the KLA were well looked after and examined by doctors before being taken to one or more buildings near the Albanian town of Burrel, north of Tirana.

"Bodies of the victims may be buried near a yellow house nearby a graveyard about 20 kilometres south of Burrel," Human Rights Watch told Mr Thaci.

In her book, Ms del Ponte said UN investigators had inspected the house and found surgical equipment and traces of blood.

They were unable to identify whether it was human blood and, since the alleged events would have taken place after Kosovo came under UN jurisdiction, Ms del Ponte said she was unable to investigate them under her mandate as war crimes prosecutor.

"These are pure fabrications by del Ponte or by Serbia itself," said Kosovo's justice minister, Nekibe Kelmendi. "I have had four private meetings with Carla del Ponte and she never once mentioned any such allegations." Pandeli Majko, who was Albania's prime minister during the Kosovo war, also rejected the accusations.