Kosovo human organ selling investigation

This France24 video is called Carla Del Ponte: Kosovo Serbs Murdered For Their Organs.

From British daily The Morning Star:

Uncovering the macabre truth

Sunday 03 May 2009

Europe’s top human rights watchdog is launching a probe into allegations that Western-backed Albanian insurgents may have kidnapped Serb civilians at the end of the 1998-99 war in former Yugoslavia, removed their organs and sold the body parts on the black market.

The allegations were first made public in a memoir last year by former chief UN war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte.

Ms del Ponte said that her office received “tantalising” information about possible organ trafficking but, “in the end, the lawyers and investigators on the cases decided that there was insufficient evidence to proceed.”

They left it to UN officials and the local Kosovo and Albanian authorities to investigate further, which never happened.

Now, Swiss senator Dick Marty has initiated a Council of Europe probe into the allegations, which have been bolstered by new evidence uncovered by Serbian officials.

They say that two wealthy Europeans – a Swiss and a German – were apparently among the recipients of kidneys, livers and other organs harvested in Albania and sold via middlemen in a meticulously orchestrated operation that involved private aircraft and tens of millions of dollars.

Bruno Vekaric, a top adviser to Serbia’s chief war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic, said that the information came from “people involved in the operation,” including former members of the now-disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

The KLA insurgency for independence from the former Yugoslavia claimed at least 10,000 lives before NATO blitzed Belgrade into submission in June 1999.

THE Colombian government has expelled a Kosovan separatist paramilitary leader in response to an Interpol extradition alert: here.