Belgrade determined to resume organ trafficking investigation

TIRANA, Oct 29 – Serbia’s War Crimes Prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic accused Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha of ordering a cover-up in the organ trafficking case.
Two days after his visit to Tirana Vukcevic spoke in a reaction after his Albanian counterpart Ina Rama refused to launch an investigation into allegations that Kosova Serb civilians were kidnapped in the province after the 1999 war, and taken to northern Albania, where their vital organs were extracted.
Serbian news agency Beta reported that Vukcevic said that Berisha “ordered the security services to destroy documentation on the missing Kosovo Serbs, their transport to Albania, and organ trade.”
Vukcevic accused Berisha of issuing this order under pressure from one of the so-called Kosova Liberation Army, KLA, leaders, and subsequent Kosova premiers, Ramush Haradinaj.
Serbia will send the case to the UN Security Council and the Council of Europe.
“The world must learn about what happened in northern Albania,” Vukcevic said.
“We have arrived at a conclusion that politics played a significant role in the cover-up of the war crimes committed against Serbs and non-Albanians in Kosovo and Metohija. Carla Del Ponte’s book, obviously, is an unpleasant testimony for Albania.”
Vukcevic also said that some 300 people were kidnapped and taken to Albania in this way, and that there is information about several possible mass graves, but that this is something that must be investigated by Albania or by international institutions.
his office’s spokesman Bruno Vekaric
State Secretary to the Justice Ministry Slobodan Homen said that following Albania’s decision to drop the investigation, the Serbian institutions would call on the help of international organizations.
“The problem is that Albanian politics has got involved here, and that this is a purely political decision,” he said.
“Therefore, we will address international organizations, first of all, the Council of Europe’s [CoE] representative in charge of this case. We’ll provide them with all the evidence and I believe that Albania will need to explain why such a decision was taken only 12 hours after it received the evidence,” Homen said.
Vukcevic met on Monday with the Albanian chief prosecutor and her team to discuss the investigation launched by the Serbian War Crimes Prosecution into the alleged organ harvesting.
Albania’s top prosecutor said Monday she would not help a visiting Serbian war crimes prosecutor who is investigating claims of organ-trafficking that surfaced in a book earlier this year by the former chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte.
In “The Hunt: War Criminals and Me,” Del Ponte wrote that, according to her sources, about 300 people were kidnapped during the Kosovo war and transported across the border to Albania where they disappeared. There are reports that some of them ended as victims of an organ harvesting operation, Del Ponte wrote.
Vukcevic’s spokesman Bruno Vekaric said that the Albanian decision to refuse to cooperate in the Serbian probe is politically motivated.
“The Albanian prosecutors made a hasty decision not to take our evidence into consideration, obviously under intense political pressure,” said Vekaric.
Albanian Prosecutor-General Ina Rama said the country would only assist prosecutors from the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague on the case _ if they want to reopen it. Rama said tribunal prosecutors had conducted an investigation in 2005 and concluded that the organ trafficking claims were not true.