EU to probe organ trafficking claims in Albania

TIRANA, Oct. 5 – The head of the EU mission in Kosovo Xavier de Marnhac on Wednesday said an investigator would visit Albania soon to probe allegations of organ trafficking.
The top prosecutor of the special investigation team created from the mission, known as EULEX, would come to Tirana in the coming weeks, according to De Marnhac who was on a visit in the Albanian capital.
“It is in the interest of all the region that this investigation comes to a clear conclusion and is able to provide an end to that story,” De Marnhac said at a news conference.
EULEX has launched a probe based on a Council of Europe report that suggested Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci was once the boss of a criminal underworld behind the alleged organ trade during the 1998-99 war against Serbia.
The report alleges that civilians detained by the now-disbanded rebel Kosovo Liberation Army were shot dead to sell their kidneys on the black market at the time.
Both Thaci and Tirana have denied such allegations.
The report was prepared last December by Swiss Senator Dick Marty, a Council of Europe investigator, who led a team of investigators to Kosovo and Albania in 2009, following allegations of organ trafficking published in a book by former U.N. War Crimes tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, who said she was given information by Western journalists.
Marty’s investigation found that there were a number of detention facilities in Albania, where both Kosovar opponents of the KLA and Serbians 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.”
Albania also has said it is open to an international investigation.
Albanian Foreign Minister Edmond Haxhinasto said the government and all institutions would be “open and supportive to a full and conclusive investigation.”
“We are sure that will prove the falsity of allegations and we want that such a chapter closes once and for all,” he said at the joint news conference with de Marnhac.
The situation in Kosovo’s north has been tense recently with Serbians, who refuse to work with Kosovo officials and who consider the region a part of Serbia, despite Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence. Consequently, they are blocking the roads to stop ethnic Albanian dominated authorities from stretching their control over the disputed territory.
De Marnhac denounced an overnight explosion of a car of one of the mission’s interpreters as “not the way to solve the problems.”
No person was injured.
Meanwhile, a trial of Kosovars accused of participating in an international organ trafficking ring opened in Pristina, Kosovo, on Tuesday.
A European Union prosecutor read out an indictment charging the seven Kosovo nationals of involvement in an international organ trafficking network.
In the indictment, Jonathan Ratel said the defendants, including a former senior Health Ministry official, ran an international network that falsely promised poor people payment for their kidneys, then sold the organs for as much as 100,000 Euros ($137,000).
The trial continued Wednesday but was closed to the public due to the questioning of a protected witness.