Kosovo's PM linked to criminal network

BELGRADE - Kosovo's Government claimed last night that it was being targeted in a smear campaign after a leaked report linked its first elected Prime Minister with a criminal network involved for a decade in the smuggling of arms, drugs and human organs.

Hashim Thaci, who claimed victory on Tuesday in Kosovo's first general election since it declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, is accused of carrying out assassinations and beatings with four other men, according to a report from the Council of Europe cited by the Guardian.

The report was produced after Carla del Ponte, a former chief prosecutor of The Hague war crimes tribunal, claimed that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) kidnapped Serbs in order to harvest their organs but that she had been prevented from investigating.

A short statement by the Kosovo Government said the whole affair had the aim of "smearing the KLA", which fought Serbian forces in 1998 and 1999 under the leadership of Thaci and his allies.

The Council of Europe report will be presented by its author Dick Marty, a human rights investigator, in Paris tomorrow.

According to the report, civilians detained by the KLA were allegedly shot to death in northern Albania so their kidneys could be extracted and sold on the black market after the war in Kosovo ended in 1999.

Marty, a Swiss senator, led a Council of Europe team of investigators to Kosovo and Albania in 2009.

Marty is known internationally for a 2007 probe on behalf of the Council of Europe that accused 14 European governments of allowing the CIA to run secret prisons and conduct rendition flights from 2002 to 2005.

The 55-page report is an attempt to cast new light on the KLA, which received United States backing in its fight to secure Kosovo's independence from Serbia in 1999. Marty says it is an attempt to unearth alleged crimes that went unpunished in the post-war period.

Marty's investigation found that there were a number of detention facilities in Albania, where both Kosovan opponents of the KLA and Serbs were allegedly held once the hostilities in Kosovo were over in 1999, including a "state-of-the-art reception centre for the organised crime of organ trafficking".

The report says the captives had their blood drawn and tested to help determine whether their organs would be suitable for transplant, and were examined "by men referred to as 'doctors"' in the towns of Rripe and Fushe-Kruje.

Marty said his findings were based on testimonies of "KLA insider sources" such as drivers, bodyguards, and other "fixers" involved in logistical and practical tasks, as well as "organisers," or the ringleaders behind the lucrative organ trade. The report, however, does not name any of the sources, or the number of people who were allegedly killed in the process.

The accounts pointed to "a methodology by which all of the captives were killed, usually by a gunshot to the head, before being operated on to remove one or more of their organs," the report said.

The report also pointed to "a small but inestimably powerful group of KLA personalities" known as the Drenica Group whose "boss" was Thaci. The investigator said his team's firsthand sources "credibly implicated" some KLA leaders and members of Thaci's inner circle for "having ordered - and in some cases personally overseen - assassinations, detentions, beatings and interrogations in various parts of Kosovo."

The allegations emerged on the same day that a former senior official in Kosovo's Health Ministry and six other men, appeared in court in the country's capital Pristina charged with running an organ-harvesting ring.

Jonathan Ratel, the European Union prosecutor in the case, said the men had promised impoverished people from across eastern Europe as much as €20,000 ($35,000) for their organs but never handed the sums over, while taking between €80,000 and €100,000 from recipients. The operations were carried out in Pristina.

Surgeon Lutfi Dervishi, is alleged to have headed the group which included two doctors and two anaesthetists, all from Kosovo.

- Independent, AP