Europe to check Serb claim of organ harvest

TIRANA, Aug 4 – Dick Marty, rapporteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, on Tuesday began a fact-finding visit to Serbia, immediately followed by a visit to Albania in connection with his forthcoming report on inhuman treatment of people and illicit trafficking in human organs in Kosovo.
Marty will meet various official representatives in the two countries, including the Justice and Interior ministers and state prosecutors, the national parliamentary delegations and NGOs, particularly ones representing the families of missing persons.
The Council of Europe began an investigation on Monday into Serb allegations that Serbian civilians were abducted in Kosovo during the Kosovo war of 1998-99 and taken to Albania, where their organs were extracted for sale before they were killed.
Marty has previously investigated the existence of alleged secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons in Europe used to interrogate terrorist suspects.
Albania has denied the allegations. Tirana turned down Belgrade’s efforts to investigate the case on Albanian territory saying that only the international courts could open such a case.
Albanians and Serbs accuse the other of atrocities.
Serbian war crimes investigators are alleging that up to 500 Serbs from Kosovo disappeared during the Kosovo war.
Ethnic Albanian officials in Prishtina, Kosovo’s capital, have strenuously denied the allegations, saying they are politically motivated and aimed at undermining Kosovo, which defied Serbia by declaring independence last year.
Serbian investigators say they have evidence that at least 10 people were abducted by ethnic-Albanian guerrillas as part of an alleged underground trafficking operation in which the guerrillas made use of a network of hidden hospitals in Albania to extract organs, before dumping the bodies of victims into mass graves.
The allegations surfaced publicly last year in a memoir by Carla Del Ponte, the former chief United Nations prosecutor for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. In the book, Del Ponte claims, based on what she describes as credible witnesses and reports, that after NATO bombed Serbia in 1999, ethnic Albanian guerrillas transported hundreds of Serbian prisoners into Northern Albania, where they were killed and their organs “harvested” and trafficked out of Tirana, the Albanian capital.
When the book was published, ethnic Albanian officials and many analysts questioned why Del Ponte had chosen to reveal the allegations five years after her investigators examined the claims. They also noted that the inquiry had failed to provide enough evidence to form a case.