Tirana, Pristina shun Council of Europe investigator

Swiss lawyer Dick Marty, an investigator from the human rights watchdog The Council of Europe, was in the region to investigate claims that guerrillas from the Kosovo Liberation Army sold organs on the black market.

The organs were allegedly removed from abducted Serb and Roma civilians during the ethnic Albanian rebellion in 1998-1999 and sold.

Former chief prosecutor of the United Nations war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Carla del Ponte said in her book, The Hunt, published in April last year that she received information that about 300 people, mainly Serbs and Roma, were abducted and transferred to northern Albania where their organs were extracted and trafficked during 1999.

Hundreds of people who disappeared at time of the KLA rebellion are still listed as missing.

Marty was told by officials in the Albanian capital, Tirana, that only the Albanian authorities were entitled to carry out an investigation. The officials dismissed the claims as "Serbian propaganda."

"Only Albanian prosecutors have the right to carry out an investigation on Albanian territory," justice minister Enkelejd Alibeaj was quoted by Kosovo television RTV21 as telling Marty.

He dismissed the allegations as "false claims" without any proof.

"I refuse to believe that it is true (organs trafficking), but we would like this matter to be investigated," Marty reportedly replied.

Wanda Trosinska from Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Wednesday the group had information that "at least 400 people were transferred from Kosovo to Albania where all traces of them were lost".

"We demand from Kosovo and Albanian authorities, as well as from most important international institutions, to determine the fate of these people and what happened to them," Trosinska said in Brussels.