CoE’s Marty blames Albania in alleged organ trafficking case

TIRANA, Dec. 15 – A report prepared for Europe’s main human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe, says Serbs detained by the Kosovo Liberation Army in the late 1990s were allegedly shot to death in northern Albania so their kidneys could be extracted and sold on the black market after the war in Kosovo ended in 1999.
The 55-page report authored of CoE investigator Dick Marty also suggested Kosovo’s prime minister Hashim Thaci was once the “boss” of a criminal underworld behind the alleged grisly trade.
Kosovo’s government branded the report as “baseless” and described it as an attempt “to tarnish the image of the Kosovo Liberation Army.” In a statement, the government also accused Marty of bias and “fabrications.”
Kosovo’s government described Marty’s allegation as “slanderous”, and part of an attempt to “obstruct” Thaci, whose party this month won Kosovo’s first election since it declared independence from Serbia _ in a vote tainted by claims of fraud.
The government said in the statement it would take all necessary legal and political means to counter Marty’s “fabrications” and urged Council of Europe members to oppose the report.
Marty, a Swiss senator, led a Council of Europe team of investigators to Kosovo and Albania in 2009, following allegations of organ trafficking by the KLA published in a book by former U.N. War Crimes tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte.
Marty is known internationally for a 2007 probe on behalf of the Council of Europe that accused 14 European governments of allowing the CIA to run secret prisons and conduct rendition flights from 2002 to 2005.
Marty’s investigation found that there were a number of detention facilities in Albania, where both Kosovar opponents of the KLA and Serbs were allegedly held once the hostilities in Kosovo were over in 1999, including a “state-of-the-art reception center for the organized crime of organ trafficking.”
The report says the captives had their blood drawn and tested to help determine whether their organs would be suitable for transplant, and were examined “by men referred to as ‘doctors'” in the towns of Rripe and Fushe-Kruje.
Albania’s Prosecutor General’s office said that for the Rripe case there were international experts visiting Albania and prosecutors from the Hague and local ones could not come out something true from the alleged charges.
While on the Fushe Kruje case a spokesman of the same office said they had no data or proof at all about that and it was the first time they had heard about it.
The report alleges that the captives were first taken to a house in Albania run by an ethnic Albanian with ties to KLA’s leadership. When the surgeons were ready, KLA gunmen would shoot the captives _ their corpses quickly taken to an operating clinic, it said.
Marty did not specify how many people were killed for their organs, but said the “filtering” process allegedly ended in Fushe-Kruje where “the small, select group of KLA captives who were brought this far met their death.”
In his report, Marty says that Fushe-Kruje was selected for its proximity to Albania’s main international airport, which “therefore offered accessibility for incoming international visitors and outgoing shipments alike.”
Albania has consistently denied that any crimes related to the Kosovo war occurred on its territory. The Prime Minister, Sali Berisha, earlier dismissed the claims in Del Ponte’s book.
Albanian Chief Prosecutor Ina Rama has said the allegations were too vague to investigate and refused to respond to persistent queries from journalists wishing to discuss the matter. The evidence now is too great to be ignored.
The draft report, prepared by the Swiss senator Dick Marty, made public on Tuesday, talks in horrendous details of abductions from Kosovo to Albania and of organ trafficking – claims first mentioned publicly in the memoir of Carla del Ponte, the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, ICTY.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe will debate the report in Strasbourg on Jan. 25, council said.