Hague investigators to question witnesses in Albania

[Musaka]

Belgrade – The chief investigator of the Hague Tribunal Patrick Teres is coming to Belgrade today where he shall meet with the new Minister of justice Snezana Malovic and War crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic.

They shall talk about the investigation concerning taking and sale of body organs from the Serbs abducted in Kosovo and Metohija.
As ‘Blic’ learns, Serbia officials shall suggest Teres that a Serbian investigator also travels with the Hague Tribunal’s investigator to Albania and Kosovo and Metohija to question the witnesses together.
‘Albanian witnesses expressed readiness to testify about the sale of body organs before the Tribunal’s investigators. They shall also reply to questions set by a Serbian judge’, ‘Blic’ source says.
The Hague prosecution earlier expressed readiness to help in the investigation. The former chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte wrote in her recently published book ‘The Hunt’ that the prosecution while investigating crimes committed by the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) found out that body organs were removed from some of the Serbs that disappeared in 1999 in Kosovo and Metohija and then sold to foreign clinics.
The victims were ‘probably abducted after NATO aggression, when the international peace-keeping forces were already deployed in the province’. In the operation of the smuggling of body organs ‘high members of the KLA took active role’. Del Ponte does not mention their names.
She writes that a group of reliable journalists told the investigators and the UNMIK officials that in the summer of 1999 Kosovo Albanians transported by trucks about 300 abducted Serbs and other non-Albanians to the camps such as Kukesh and Tropoja in the north of Albania. The younger and vital prisoners were after medical examination transported to Burela and the surrounding where they were detained. A group of them were detained in a barrack behind a yellow house, twenty kilometers south of that town.
In a room that served as an operation theatre the surgeons were taking organs from the victims that were then transported abroad via Rinas Airport at Tirana.



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