Serbia-Albania Organ Trafficking

TIRANA, March 3 – Serbia will ask Albania to reinvestigate claims that some of the Serbs who disappeared during the Kosovo conflict may have been killed for their organs in Albania, according to an international news agency.
Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic said Serb investigators have new evidence that about 300 Serbs have been kidnapped in Kosovo during the 1998-99 war, of whom at least some became the victims of an international organ-trafficking ring in neighboring Albania, The Associated Press reported Monday.
Albania has refused to reopen the investigation, claiming international experts who have probed the Serb claims in 2004 concluded there was insufficient evidence to prove the organ-trafficking operation existed.
Prosecutor General Ina Rama said if the request came they would be considering it based on the country’s legislation. Rama has said that only international institutions would be entitled to investigate in Albania on this issue.
In her autobiography published last year, former chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte wrote that about 300 people were kidnapped and transported to Albania, where they disappeared. There were reports that some were victims of an organ harvesting operation, Del Ponte wrote. She did not identify the source of those reports.
Vukcevic said Monday that Serb investigators have new evidence that the surgeries in which the organs, such as kidneys and livers, were extracted were performed in at least four locations in Albania.
Photos of alleged evidence including bloodstains, syringes, empty bottles of muscle relaxant, surgical gear and other material allegedly discovered in one of the makeshift hospitals in Albania were shown to reporters during Vukcevic’s press conference Monday.
Photos of some of the alleged Serb victims, as well as satellite locations of some of the sites in Albania were kidnapped Serbs were allegedly tortured and killed were also presented.
“We will again ask Albania to reopen the investigation,” Vukcevic said, adding that the authorities have identified 10 Kosovo Albanian rebels who have allegedly executed the kidnapped Serbs in Albania.
He said a delegation of the Council of Europe, EU’s top human rights organization, will visit Serbia, Kosovo and Albania starting at the end of March to conduct an independent investigation.
The delegation will be headed by Swill Senator Dick Marty, who led a recent probe into allegations that the CIA operated secret terrorist prisons in Eastern Europe, Vukcevic said.
Thousands of people were killed as Serb security troops cracked down on Kosovo Albanian separatists in the war. The conflict ended after NATO bombed Serbia in 1999.
Albania supported the ethnic Albanian rebellion in Kosovo.
Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in February 2008, a situation Serbia still has not accepted.