Albania accused of obstructing organ trafficking case

Alston was in Tirana on Tuesday when he said that the Albanian government has put up "formal obstacles" in the path of the investigation.

"None of the efforts to investigate have received meaningful cooperation on the side of the government of Albania," Alston told a news conference, according to Reuters.

Explanations offered to him by officials "amounted in practice to a game of bureaucratic and diplomatic ping pong in which the responsibility for not responding to requests was moved from one office to the next," the news agency reported.

"The bottom line is that the issue is definitely stalled. All Albanian officials I have met with consider the claims, charges of killings, as ridiculous. If it is ridiculous, in order to get rid of this issue, make available a proposal for an independent investigation and offer genuine co-operation.", Alston said.

Serbia welcomed the UN expert's call for an independent investigation.

"That would be the right path to find out the truth and achieve full regional co-operation," Bruno Vekaric, a spokesman for Serbia's war crimes prosecutor, told Reuters news agency.

Alston is a UN special rapporteur to monitor extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

Serbia's War Crimes Prosecution launched its investigation into the case, informally known as the Yellow House, after reports surfaced that hundreds of Kosovo Serb civilians were kidnapped in 1999, and taken to northern Albania by Kosovo's ethnic Albanian terrorists.

According this, the victims' vital organs were removed and sold in the black market.

Kosovo's Albanian authorities and those in Albania rejected these accusations.

Reuters reports today that "former UN (Hague Tribunal) War Crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte said in a book published in 2008 her team had investigated reports that around 300 Serbs held in Albania had had organs removed, apparently for trafficking."