Report Names Kosovo Leader as Crime Boss

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/world/europe/16kosovo.html?_r=1&ref=europe

Report Names Kosovo Leader as Crime Boss

By DOREEN CARVAJAL and MARLISE SIMONS

Published: December 15, 2010

PARIS — A two-year international inquiry has concluded that the prime minister of Kosovo led a clan of criminal entrepreneurs whose activities included trafficking in organs extracted from Serbian prisoners executed during the Kosovo conflict in 1999.

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·        Report on Organ Trafficking Network (pdf)

The inquiry, prepared for the Council of Europe, names the prime minister, Hashim Thaci, as the boss of the Drenica Group, an organized crime network that flourished in Kosovo and Albania after the war and exerted control over numerous rackets, including the heroin trade, and six secret detention centers in Albania, some used in a black market in human organs.

Kosovo denounced the findings of the inquiry, which began to leak late Tuesday, ahead of the official release on Thursday. One official called the report slanderous and timed to harm Mr. Thaci, whose party recently won the first parliamentary election in Kosovo since it declared independence from Serbia.

The report did not explicitly describe any role of Mr. Thaci in the organ trafficking network.

The Council of Europe said the investigating team that gathered evidence used foreign intelligence analysts, international organizations, former fighters, logistics operatives and victims. The report cites some names but withholds others, saying local witnesses feared for their lives.

The roots of the network date from 1999 as the Kosovo conflict was ending. Over time, the ring established ties to "a broader, more complex organized criminal conspiracy" that operated in three other countries and endured for more than a decade, according to the report. The report was prepared by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who had previously investigated allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency abducted and imprisoned terrorism suspects in Europe.

Mr. Marty, reached by telephone, declined to discuss the report or Mr. Thaci's role until he presented the report on Thursday to the legal affairs committee of the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly in Paris.

The allegations of organ trafficking are separately the focus of a trial in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. A European Union prosecutor, Jonathan Ratel, delivered his opening argument on Tuesday against seven men, including Israeli, Kosovar and Turkish citizens, accused of recruiting 20 people from impoverished nations with false promises of payments for their kidneys. The kidneys, in turn, were sold for enormous sums to patients from Canada, Germany, Israel and Poland. It was not clear whether, or how, the charges were connected to the cases in the report.

The Council of Europe, which is separate from the European Union, is responsible for the European Court of Human Rights. The report naming Mr. Thaci, 42, who was the political leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, or K.L.A., was initially commissioned in response to allegations about organ trafficking in 2008 memoirs by Carla Del Ponte, who had been chief prosecutor of the United Nations war crimes tribunal dealing with the former Yugoslavia.

The Council of Europe report noted that investigators for the United Nations tribunal in 2004 went to the Yellow House, a notorious location in Albania, but later destroyed some of the collected evidence, which included syringes and traces of blood. The tribunal contends that it did not find enough evidence to aid any of its cases.

"The international actors chose to turn a blind eye to the war crimes of the K.L.A., placing a premium instead on achieving some degree of short-term stability," Mr. Marty wrote.

The report included testimony of people who provided logistics for the ring, driving captives in unmarked vans between a series of way stations in Albania.

The trafficking, according to the report, evolved over time and relied on detention centers spread through Albania that were controlled by the Kosovo Liberation Army. Initially the captives were Serb prisoners, but the ring also kidnapped ethnic Albanians to settle old scores, the report said.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 16, 2010, on page A20 of the New York edition.