European Union probing Balkan organ trade
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RRIPE, Albania - Europe's top human rights watchdog is launching a probe into a bone-chilling allegation: That ethnic Albanian guerrillas may have kidnapped Serb civilians at the end of Kosovo's 1998-99 war, removed their organs and sold the body parts on the black market.
A United Nations inquiry into the issue in 2004 proved inconclusive. So did a recent investigation by The Associated Press, which obtained U.N. and Serbian documents detailing what was uncovered at a farmhouse in remote north-central Albania: bloodstains, syringes, empty bottles of muscle relaxant, surgical gear and other material. The family living in the house in Rripe offers a plausible explanation for everything the investigators found.
The allegations were first made public in a memoir last year by Carla Del Ponte, the former chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor. In "Madame Prosecutor," an account of her tenure as head of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, Del Ponte said her office was tipped to possible organ trafficking.
Although the information was "tantalizing," Del Ponte wrote, "in the end, the attorneys and investigators on the KLA cases decided that there was insufficient evidence to proceed." They left it to U.N. officials and the local Kosovo and Albanian authorities to investigate further, which never happened.
Now, a probe is being led by Dick Marty, the Swiss senator who headed an investigation into claims the CIA operated secret prisons in Eastern Europe. Marty, working on behalf of the Council of Europe, would not comment before his Balkans fact-finding mission is completed.
A United Nations inquiry into the issue in 2004 proved inconclusive. So did a recent investigation by The Associated Press, which obtained U.N. and Serbian documents detailing what was uncovered at a farmhouse in remote north-central Albania: bloodstains, syringes, empty bottles of muscle relaxant, surgical gear and other material. The family living in the house in Rripe offers a plausible explanation for everything the investigators found.
The allegations were first made public in a memoir last year by Carla Del Ponte, the former chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor. In "Madame Prosecutor," an account of her tenure as head of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, Del Ponte said her office was tipped to possible organ trafficking.
Although the information was "tantalizing," Del Ponte wrote, "in the end, the attorneys and investigators on the KLA cases decided that there was insufficient evidence to proceed." They left it to U.N. officials and the local Kosovo and Albanian authorities to investigate further, which never happened.
Now, a probe is being led by Dick Marty, the Swiss senator who headed an investigation into claims the CIA operated secret prisons in Eastern Europe. Marty, working on behalf of the Council of Europe, would not comment before his Balkans fact-finding mission is completed.
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