“Very good progress” in the case of organ trafficking
Serbian War Crime Prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic has stated that the investigation the War Crime Prosecutor's Office is carrying out on trafficking of organs of kidnapped Serbs in Kosovo is “making a very good progress.”
(KosovoCompromise Staff) Monday, December 15, 2008
"We are working on three fronts on the above issue. We are maintaining contact with many embassies. The size of the material that may be used for a good-quality investigation is growing," Vukcevic said.
He said that the Prosecutor's Office has documents, bank accounts and other material that links former Kosovo Prime Minister Ramus Haradinaj with this case.
Dick Marty, rapporteur of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Committee for human organ trafficking in the north of Albania, has announced his visit to Belgrade, Pristina and Tirana, said Vukcevic.
"We will have things to show him," said Vukcevic.
Meanwhile, the Belgrade daily Blic has reported that an international forensic report on the kidnapping of Kosovo's Serbs and harvesting of their organs is missing nine pages.
The report on the so-called yellow house in Albania, thought to have been the location where the victims' organs were removed, was put together in 2004, Blic said.
A representative of the Serbian War Crimes Prosecution travelled to New York on Friday to ask UN peacekeeping operations chief Alain le Roy to provide him with the complete report compiled by a group of international investigators.
The document was submitted in mid-June 2004 by a five-member UNMIK forensic team, who travelled to the yellow house in the town of Burrel in Albania.
Although the UN mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) representatives initially claimed that the report did not exist, the Serbian prosecution last spring gained access to the minutes from the Burrel investigation. However, it turned out that the document was missing nine pages.
According to the newspaper, someone in this way tried to hide information very important to the investigation, including the names of persons that are believed to be involved in this crime.
The report in question has information that could prove exceptionally important for the course of the pre-criminal proceedings currently under way, especially since new testimonies from witnesses of the human organ trafficking have emerged in the meantime, along with the details about camps and mass graves in Albania where those kidnapped in Kosovo were buried.
The sizeable material, Blic continued, contains information that includes data on kidney transplants taking place in clinics in Tirana and Skopje during the 1999 NATO attacks on Serbia, when members of an armed Kosovo Albanian group, known as the KLA, kidnapped several hundred Kosovo Serbs and transported them to camps in Albania.
