Report Says Kosovo Prime Minister Led Organ Trafficking Network
By DOREEN CARVAJAL
PARIS — A two-year international inquiry has concluded that the prime minister of Kosovo led a clan of criminal entrepreneurs whose activities included trafficking in organs extracted from Serbian prisoners executed during the Kosovo conflict in 1999.
The inquiry, prepared for the Council of Europe, names the prime minister, Hashim Thaci, as the boss of the Drenica Group, an organized crime network that flourished in Kosovo and Albania after the war and exerted control over numerous rackets, the heroin trade and six secret detention centers in Albania, some used in their black market in human organs.
Kosovo denounced the findings of the inquiry, which began to leak out late Tuesday, ahead of the official release Thursday. One official called the report slanderous and timed to harm Mr. Thaci, whose party recently won the first parliamentary election in Kosovo since it declared independence from Serbia. The president of Albania also called the report unfounded.
The report did not explicitly describe any role of Mr. Thaci in the organ trafficking network. The Council of Europe said the investigating team that gathered evidence used foreign intelligence analysts, international organizations, former fighters, logistics operatives and victims. The report cites some names but withholds many, saying that local witnesses feared for their lives.
The roots of the network date from 1999 as the Kosovo conflict was ending. Over time, the ring established ties to “a broader, more complex organized criminal conspiracy” that operated in three other countries and endured for more than a decade, according to the report, prepared by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who had previously investigated allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency abducted and imprisoned terrorism suspects in Europe.
Mr. Marty, reached by telephone, declined to discuss the report or Mr. Thaci’s role until he presented it Thursday to the legal affairs committee of the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly in Paris.
The allegations of organ trafficking were separately the focus of a trial in Pristina, the Kosovo capital, as a European Union prosecutor, Jonathan Ratel, delivered his opening argument Tuesday against seven men, including Israeli, Kosovar and Turkish citizens, accused of recruiting 20 people from impoverished nations with false promises of payments for their kidneys, which in turn were sold for enormous sums to patients from Canada, Germany, Israel and Poland. It was not clear whether, or how, the charges were connected to the cases in the report.
The Council of Europe, separate from the European Union, includes 47 member states and is responsible for the European Court of Human Rights. The report naming Mr. Thaci, 42, who was the political leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or K.L.A., was initially commissioned in response to allegations about organ trafficking in a 2008 memoir by Carla Del Ponte, who had been chief prosecutor of the U.N. war crimes tribunal dealing with the former Yugoslavia. .
Ms. Del Ponte, who is now the Swiss ambassador to Argentina, claimed in her book, “Madame Prosecutor,” that Kosovo Albanians smuggled human organs of kidnapped Serbs after the war ended in 1999. While prosecutor, she ordered an investigation of such trafficking but said she did not find enough evidence to bring charges against any individual. She did not pursue the issue further but called for others to investigate.
The Council of Europe report noted that investigators for the U.N. tribunal in 2004 went to the Yellow House, a notorious location in Albania, but later destroyed some of the collected evidence, which included syringes and traces of blood. The tribunal contends that it did not find enough evidence to aid any of its cases.
“The international actors chose to turn a blind eye to the war crimes of the Kosovo Liberation Army, placing a premium instead on achieving some degree of short-term stability,” Mr. Marty wrote in his report, complaining that a set of “shocking dynamics” continued to allow war criminals to elude prosecution. Witnesses have been intimidated and killed, according to the report, while there has been “a faltering political will on the part of the international community to effectively prosecute the former leaders of the K.L.A.”
The report included testimony of people who provided logistics for the ring, driving captives in unmarked vans between a series of way stations in Albania.
The trafficking, according to the report, evolved over time and relied on detention centers spread through Albania that were controlled by the Kosovo Liberation Army. The military detention facilities, the report said, changed in character to private residences, including Albanian farmhouses and storage barns and ultimately a makeshift operating clinic, where human organs were shipped out of Albania and sold to private overseas clinics.
Initially the captives were Serb prisoners, but the ring also kidnapped ethnic Albanians to settle old scores, the report said. Captives, according to the report, were “filtered” for their suitability as donors, based on sex, age, health conditions ethnic origin. “We heard numerous references to captives’ not merely having been handed over, but also having been ‘bought’ and ‘sold,”‘ Mr. Marty wrote.
The final destination was a two-story farmhouse in Fushe Kruje in the west of Albania, which was close to the airport hub serving Tirana and where the “filtering” and blood testing took place. Some of the guards told investigators that a few captives understood what was about to happen and “pleaded with their captors to be spared the fate of being chopped into pieces.”
Captives, according to the report, were then killed and their organs removed. “When the transplant surgeons were confirmed to be in position and ready to operate, the captives were brought out of the ‘safe house’ individually, summarily executed by a K.L.A. gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic.”
Mr. Marty called for increased resources and a new independent investigation to root out what actually happened at the secret detention centers. Part of the problem, the report noted, is that after the war, the international authorities tended to regard Kosovar Albanians as innocent victims and the Serbs as “evil oppressors.”
“There cannot and must not be one justice for the winners and another for the losers,” Mr. Marty wrote in his report.
In Belgrade, Serbian prosecutors hailed the report as a “victory that returned hope to the families of kidnapped or missing victims.”
The inquiry, prepared for the Council of Europe, names the prime minister, Hashim Thaci, as the boss of the Drenica Group, an organized crime network that flourished in Kosovo and Albania after the war and exerted control over numerous rackets, the heroin trade and six secret detention centers in Albania, some used in their black market in human organs.
Kosovo denounced the findings of the inquiry, which began to leak out late Tuesday, ahead of the official release Thursday. One official called the report slanderous and timed to harm Mr. Thaci, whose party recently won the first parliamentary election in Kosovo since it declared independence from Serbia. The president of Albania also called the report unfounded.
The report did not explicitly describe any role of Mr. Thaci in the organ trafficking network. The Council of Europe said the investigating team that gathered evidence used foreign intelligence analysts, international organizations, former fighters, logistics operatives and victims. The report cites some names but withholds many, saying that local witnesses feared for their lives.
The roots of the network date from 1999 as the Kosovo conflict was ending. Over time, the ring established ties to “a broader, more complex organized criminal conspiracy” that operated in three other countries and endured for more than a decade, according to the report, prepared by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who had previously investigated allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency abducted and imprisoned terrorism suspects in Europe.
Mr. Marty, reached by telephone, declined to discuss the report or Mr. Thaci’s role until he presented it Thursday to the legal affairs committee of the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly in Paris.
The allegations of organ trafficking were separately the focus of a trial in Pristina, the Kosovo capital, as a European Union prosecutor, Jonathan Ratel, delivered his opening argument Tuesday against seven men, including Israeli, Kosovar and Turkish citizens, accused of recruiting 20 people from impoverished nations with false promises of payments for their kidneys, which in turn were sold for enormous sums to patients from Canada, Germany, Israel and Poland. It was not clear whether, or how, the charges were connected to the cases in the report.
The Council of Europe, separate from the European Union, includes 47 member states and is responsible for the European Court of Human Rights. The report naming Mr. Thaci, 42, who was the political leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or K.L.A., was initially commissioned in response to allegations about organ trafficking in a 2008 memoir by Carla Del Ponte, who had been chief prosecutor of the U.N. war crimes tribunal dealing with the former Yugoslavia. .
Ms. Del Ponte, who is now the Swiss ambassador to Argentina, claimed in her book, “Madame Prosecutor,” that Kosovo Albanians smuggled human organs of kidnapped Serbs after the war ended in 1999. While prosecutor, she ordered an investigation of such trafficking but said she did not find enough evidence to bring charges against any individual. She did not pursue the issue further but called for others to investigate.
The Council of Europe report noted that investigators for the U.N. tribunal in 2004 went to the Yellow House, a notorious location in Albania, but later destroyed some of the collected evidence, which included syringes and traces of blood. The tribunal contends that it did not find enough evidence to aid any of its cases.
“The international actors chose to turn a blind eye to the war crimes of the Kosovo Liberation Army, placing a premium instead on achieving some degree of short-term stability,” Mr. Marty wrote in his report, complaining that a set of “shocking dynamics” continued to allow war criminals to elude prosecution. Witnesses have been intimidated and killed, according to the report, while there has been “a faltering political will on the part of the international community to effectively prosecute the former leaders of the K.L.A.”
The report included testimony of people who provided logistics for the ring, driving captives in unmarked vans between a series of way stations in Albania.
The trafficking, according to the report, evolved over time and relied on detention centers spread through Albania that were controlled by the Kosovo Liberation Army. The military detention facilities, the report said, changed in character to private residences, including Albanian farmhouses and storage barns and ultimately a makeshift operating clinic, where human organs were shipped out of Albania and sold to private overseas clinics.
Initially the captives were Serb prisoners, but the ring also kidnapped ethnic Albanians to settle old scores, the report said. Captives, according to the report, were “filtered” for their suitability as donors, based on sex, age, health conditions ethnic origin. “We heard numerous references to captives’ not merely having been handed over, but also having been ‘bought’ and ‘sold,”‘ Mr. Marty wrote.
The final destination was a two-story farmhouse in Fushe Kruje in the west of Albania, which was close to the airport hub serving Tirana and where the “filtering” and blood testing took place. Some of the guards told investigators that a few captives understood what was about to happen and “pleaded with their captors to be spared the fate of being chopped into pieces.”
Captives, according to the report, were then killed and their organs removed. “When the transplant surgeons were confirmed to be in position and ready to operate, the captives were brought out of the ‘safe house’ individually, summarily executed by a K.L.A. gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic.”
Mr. Marty called for increased resources and a new independent investigation to root out what actually happened at the secret detention centers. Part of the problem, the report noted, is that after the war, the international authorities tended to regard Kosovar Albanians as innocent victims and the Serbs as “evil oppressors.”
“There cannot and must not be one justice for the winners and another for the losers,” Mr. Marty wrote in his report.
In Belgrade, Serbian prosecutors hailed the report as a “victory that returned hope to the families of kidnapped or missing victims.”
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