European Union probing Balkan organ trade

updated 6:38 a.m. ET May 3, 2009

RRIPE, Albania - Europe's top human rights watchdog is launching a probe into a bone-chilling allegation: That ethnic Albanian guerrillas may have kidnapped Serb civilians at the end of Kosovo's 1998-99 war, removed their organs and sold the body parts on the black market.

A United Nations inquiry into the issue in 2004 proved inconclusive. So did a recent investigation by The Associated Press, which obtained U.N. and Serbian documents detailing what was uncovered at a farmhouse in remote north-central Albania: bloodstains, syringes, empty bottles of muscle relaxant, surgical gear and other material. The family living in the house in Rripe offers a plausible explanation for everything the investigators found.

The allegations were first made public in a memoir last year by Carla Del Ponte, the former chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor. In "Madame Prosecutor," an account of her tenure as head of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, Del Ponte said her office was tipped to possible organ trafficking.

Although the information was "tantalizing," Del Ponte wrote, "in the end, the attorneys and investigators on the KLA cases decided that there was insufficient evidence to proceed." They left it to U.N. officials and the local Kosovo and Albanian authorities to investigate further, which never happened.

Now, a probe is being led by Dick Marty, the Swiss senator who headed an investigation into claims the CIA operated secret prisons in Eastern Europe. Marty, working on behalf of the Council of Europe, would not comment before his Balkans fact-finding mission is completed.

New evidence?
Serbian authorities claim to have uncovered new evidence.

They say two wealthy Europeans — a Swiss and a German — apparently were among the recipients of kidneys, livers and other organs harvested in Albania and sold via middlemen in a macabre but meticulously orchestrated operation that involved private aircraft and tens of millions of dollars.

Bruno Vekaric, a top adviser to Vladimir Vukcevic, Serbia's chief war crimes prosecutor, declined to identify the alleged recipients but said the information came from "people involved in the operation," including former members of the now-disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army.

Vukcevic showed the AP a thick blue binder jammed with documents he recently handed over to Marty. He declined to let AP review the statements, citing the need to protect the identities of Albanian informants.

KLA guerrillas fought Serbian troops loyal to the late strongman Slobodan Milosevic in a conflict that claimed at least 10,000 lives. The bloodshed ended after NATO pummeled Serbia with airstrikes and sent in peacekeepers in June 1999. Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leaders declared independence in February 2008.

Srdjan Ilic / AP Budimir Maslar,center, whose sister was missing during 1998-1999 Kosovo war, speaks to The Associated Press nside the office of union of families of missing Kosovo Serbs, in Belgrade.

The alleged organ harvesting reportedly happened in the confusing weeks that followed the war's end — a time when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians who had sought refuge in neighboring Albania were streaming back into Kosovo.

Serbian officials say up to 400 Kosovo Serbs vanished without a trace during that period, and some fear a few dozen may have fallen victim to an organ operation.

Albanian and Kosovar authorities vehemently deny that Serbs were killed and their organs harvested. In an interview with the AP, Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci — himself a former KLA commander who once went by the nom-de-guerre "The Snake" — dismissed the allegations as "a complete fabrication."

But Serbia is pressing Albanian and international authorities to take another look at the house, as well as at maps and other intelligence it claims detail the locations of three mass graves in northern Albania — sites that Serbia suspects may contain the remains of missing Kosovo Serbs.

Vekaric told the AP his office has obtained statements from ex-KLA rebels confirming they had access to Albanian military clinics in the area, as well as testimony from two Serbs who escaped prison camps run by the KLA in northern Albania and said the rebels operated medical clinics in the area.

He said Serbian prosecutors also have the bank account details of individuals who profited from sales of organs, narcotics and weapons trafficked through Kosovo and northern Albania, along with photos of surgical scissors allegedly recovered from the house.

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