Could this be true?

[gorski]

Ahem... A few might have to eat their words...

 

[selamlar]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7384679.stm

Looks like there is more to this story than it at first appeared.

 

[frogwoman]

im starting to think so too

of course, there are thousands of albanian people missing as well which needs to be investigated urgently ...

the kosovo institutions and the albanian authorities are acting very suspiciously over the whole thing, refusing to investigate and even threatening to sue her! if there's really nothing to hide they should agree to a full and proper investigation ... as should the serbian government ... i don't know how far they've been cooperating as far as this sort of stuff goes ...

 

[dylanredefined]

They claim they already looked into it and found nothing and no offical complaint raised .Is it just lurid allegations to sell book or what?
Considering what various groups got up to throughout the balkans cant see
any authortiy really wanting to investigate new atrocity claims .Probably plenty to be going on with .

 

[zoltan]

I still cant see it meself *shrugs* is Ms Ponte ramping up the publicity for her book ? That would be a very poor show if it was the case

the KLA & pals were making so much money from Oil / Grain/ etc smuggling, the numbers involved for selling organs would be chickenfeed - I dont think it could be an orchestrated programme, mebbes a few "independants" if it did happen, but ...

I have heard similar tales, including the usual corpse Mutilation ( ear collecting - watching too many 'nam films ) and other shit.

I am prepared to eat my words though if it comes out to be true, sadly.

 

[gorski]

In case y'all didn't know, this might be worth a good old fashioned dig...

http://www.tol.cz/look/TOL/home.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrIssue=269

http://www.tol.cz/look/TOL/article....ion=4&NrIssue=269&NrSection=3&NrArticle=19611

http://www.tol.cz/look/TOL/article....ion=4&NrIssue=269&NrSection=3&NrArticle=19612

Echhhhhhhhh....

Also, one might look at STINA:

http://www.stina.hr/index_en.htm

 

[gorski]

The Office of the Prosecutor would eventually receive information, which UNMIK investigators and officials had acquired from a team of credible journalists, about how, during the summer months of 1999, Kosovo Albanians had trucked 100 to 300 abducted persons across the border from Kosovo into northern Albania. These captives were initially locked inside warehouses and other facilities, including locations in the towns of Kukës and Tropoje. According to the journalists' sources, whom they identified only as Kosovo Albanians, some of the younger, fitter captives, who were kept well fed, examined by doctors and never beaten, were transferred to other holding facilities in and around Burrel, including a shack behind a yellow house about twenty kilometers south of the town. A room inside this yellow house, the journalists reported, had been set up as a makeshift surgical clinic; and there, doctors extracted the captive's internal organs. These organs were then smuggled through Rinas airport near Tirana for transplant into paying patients in surgical wards abroad, according to the sources, including one who described delivering such a shipment to the airport. Victims deprived of only their first kidney were sewn up and confined again inside the shack until they were killed for their other vital organs; in this way, the other captives in the shack learned of their approaching fate; and they reportedly pleaded in terror to be killed immediately. Among the captives reportedly taken to this shack were women from Kosovo, Albania, Russia, and other Slavic countries, and two of the sources said they helped bury the bodies of the dead around the yellow house and at a nearby graveyard. According to the sources, the smuggling operation occurred with the knowledge and active involvement of mid- and senior-level KLA officers. Tribunal investigators found that, while the information from the journalists and UNMIK officials was sketchy, the details were internally consistent and corroborated information the Tribunal had developed in house. “The (Office of the Prosecutor's) in-house material does not … contain material about Albania as such; however the few witness statements and some other material that we have do corroborate to a certain extent the information above,” I read in a memo on this activity. “All the individuals that the sources have mentioned to be in the camp/s in Albania in late summer 1999 had gone missing in summer 1999 and have not been seen since.”

and

The recommendations were obvious: “Bearing in mind the extremely serious nature of these cases, the fact that practically none of the bodies of the victims of the KLA have been found in exhumations in Kosovo and the fact that these atrocities were allegedly committed under the supervision or command of the KLA mid- or high-level leadership, they should definitely be investigated as properly as possible by professional and experienced investigators.” The known victims in these cases had probably been abducted after the NATO air campaign had ended – at a time when Kosovo was crawling with foreign peacekeepers and legions of human-rights investigators and aid workers – so it was unclear whether or not the crimes committed during this period fell under the Yugoslavia Tribunal's mandate. The Office of the Prosecutor wanted the journalists and UNMIK to provide the sources’ names and other personal details and all other information they had about these allegations. The Office had to compile and analyze all in-house material related to the case. If the journalists and UNMIK were uncooperative, the Office had somehow to identify, locate, and interview the journalists' sources, without knowing their identities or whereabouts; undertake a mission with the sources to the locations in Albania; and, if necessary, conduct a crime scene investigation and exhumations.

Kosovo Serbs leaving the province after the 1999 NATO bombing campaign. Photo: Kosovo.net

During the summer of 2002, the Office of the Prosecutor continued to have trouble amassing evidence of sufficient quality to submit indictments. The investigators continued to have trouble finding evidence linking ranking officers with episodes of criminal behavior. Trial attorneys discussed jurisdictional problems in presenting charges based upon incidents that had occurred after the Serbian authorities had departed Kosovo. Many of our victims were elderly men and women who had remained in their villages alone after all the younger people had fled, so we had dead or missing victims and few, if any, witnesses. We still lacked documents outlining the KLA’s structure and witnesses prepared to speak about this structure. Teams of forensic anthropologists developed information on about thirty bodies found near Lake Radonjic [in western Kosovo], but, by the autumn, the investigators, using DNA testing, had positively identified only eight.

On October 22, 2002, I was back in Pristina. KFOR’s new commander, Fabio Mini, an Italian general, assured me that his forces would be ready to arrest any of the Tribunal's accused at any time and that the appropriate threat assessments of fourteen potential KLA targets had been completed. I told General Mini that one or two indictments might be confirmed by the end of the year. Mini said KFOR would plan first to persuade the accused to surrender voluntarily, but would also have an arrest operation ready to proceed immediately. He, like [French Gen. Marcel] Valentin before him, expressed concern about UNMIK’s trustworthiness. “It will be necessary to cooperate with UNMIK at the last minute,” General Mini said. Then he joked about the close relationship between some UNMIK personnel and former KLA leaders. When the first arrests happen, Mini said, “we will see many local leaders going on vacation with a US escort.” We also spoke of missing persons, indications that there were mass graves in three areas of northern Albania, and the possible involvement of Albania's secret service. Mini instructed his people to make immediate arrangements for air reconnaissance, including infrared scanning of possible mass grave locations before the winter snows arrived. At UNMIK we learned that one source had demanded 50,000 euros to identify each of two graves in northern Albania.

Only months later did Tribunal and UNMIK investigators travel to central Albania and visit the yellow house the journalists' sources had identified as the place where captives had been killed for their organs. The journalists led the investigators and an Albanian prosecutor to the site. The house was now white; the owner denied that it had ever been repainted even though the investigators saw obvious blotches of yellow along the base of its walls. On the ground, investigators discovered pieces of gauze. Nearby lay a used syringe, two empty plastic drip bags crusted with dirt, and spent medicine vials, some of them for a muscle-relaxer routinely used during surgery. A forensic chemical spray revealed blood splatters along the walls and floor of a room inside the house, except for a clear area of the floor about six feet in length and two feet wide. The owner offered up a variety of explanations for the blood stains during the two days the investigators spent in the village. Initially he said that his wife had given birth to their children in this room years earlier. Later, after his wife had revealed that her children had actually been born elsewhere, he asserted that the family had used the room to slaughter animals for a Muslim holiday.

The investigators’ findings, combined with the anecdotal information the journalists had provided, were tantalizing. Stories of prisoners being killed by organ smugglers arise from many conflict areas, but rarely is there hard evidence to lift these accounts out of the realm of urban myth. The syringes, the drip bags, the gauze … were clearly corroborative evidence, but this evidence was, unfortunately, insufficient. The investigators could not determine whether the blood traces had been human. The sources had not pinpointed the locations of the alleged victims’ graves, so we found no bodies. The mission did not convince any of the people in and around the yellow house to come forward with truthful information. The journalists had all along refused to reveal their sources; and the Tribunal's investigators were unable to identify or locate them. There were also jurisdictional obstacles, given the dates of the reported abductions, the transport of the victims across the border into Albania, the criminal activity in Albania, and the crime scene there. The local Albanian prosecutor revealed another dimension of the “cooperation” problem; he boasted that his relatives had fought in the KLA and he told the Tribunal's investigator: “No Serbs are buried here. But if they did bring Serbs over the border from Kosovo and killed them, they did a good thing.” So, in the end, the attorneys and investigators on the KLA cases decided that there was insufficient evidence to proceed. Without the sources or a way to identify and find them, without bodies, and without other evidence linking high-level accused to these acts, all avenues of investigation were barred. It would be up to UNMIK or the local Kosovo and Albanian authorities, perhaps in conjunction with the Serbian law enforcement agencies, to investigate these accounts further and, if necessary, prosecute them.

What a job...

 

[gorski]

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