Byzantine Blog

Belgrade Prosecutor to Investigate Albanian Butchering Camps

On March 21, Belgrade war crimes prosecutor announced opening a case regarding the massacre of Kosovo Serbs kidnapped by the Albanian terrorist KLA for the sale of their vital organs during and after the 1999 NATO aggression.

“We are verifying statements obtained through operative work that, in 1999, two trucks carrying imprisoned Kosovo Serbs were transfered to Albania,” said War Crimes Prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic, adding that the information had been obtained from Hague Tribunal investigators, according to which there are unregistered mass graves with bodies of mutilated and murdered Kosovo Serbs in Albania.

Since Belgrade daily Glas Javnosti published the initial bits of information about the monstrous organ harvesting in Mengele- prison camps Thaci's and Ceku's KLA operated in northern Albania, apparently with the knowledge and approval of the highest officials in Albanian government, a lot of additional information with grisly details available in Del Ponte's book has been published in the Serbian media.

Yellow House of Horrors in North Albania

In her book, "The Hunt", to be published in Italy in April, Carla Del Ponte says that the ICTY prosecution was informed that Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA/UCK) conducted an illegal human organ harvesting and trafficking, using Kosovo Serbs it previously abducted as their livestock for organ extraction.

Del Ponte says that she learned from groups of reliable journalists about some 300 Serb hostages who were kidnapped by the Kosovo Albanians and taken to Albania in trucks in the summer of 1999, after the end of the NATO aggression on FR Yugoslavia, at the time when international peacekeepers, investigators and representatives of human rights groups were in Serbian province of Kosovo.

The kidnapped victims were first imprisoned in camps in Kukes and Tropoje. The younger and fitter prisoners were examined by Albanian medics, got food and were not beaten. After that, they were kept imprisoned in other camps in Burel and the surrounding area.

One group was held in barracks behind a yellow house some twenty kilometers to the south of that town, states the former prosecutor.

One room in that yellow house, according to the journalists, was used for involuntary surgeries, where the prisoners' organs were extracted.

Afterwards, the organs, according to the sources, were sent abroad from Mother Teresa airport in Tirana where they were used in transplantations for Western patients who could afford to pay for it.

The victims who had one kidney removed at first were returned to the same barrack to wait to be taken to a butcher block again, for other vital organs, and be killed.

"In this way, the other camp prisoners knew about the destiny that awaits them. According to the sources, they begged, in terror, to be killed at once," Del Ponte says.

There were also women among the prisoners, mainly from Kosovo province, but also from Albania, Russia and former Yugoslav republics. Two sources who testified about one of these monstrous camps claimed they were helping to bury the victims from the barracks surrounding the yellow house, at the nearby graveyard.

Even though the journalists' informations and those collected from UNMIK officials were incomplete, Hague investigators said that the details fit together, confirming the information collected by the Tribunal.

All of the victims for which the sources claimed they were imprisoned in the butchering camps' barracks around the yellow house in Albania in the summer of 1999, have been listed as missing around the same time and were never seen again.

Evidence from Del Ponte's 2003 Visit to the Scene of Crime

Del Ponte says in her book that she made a trip with a group of Hague investigators and one Albanian 'prosecutor' to the yellow house in Albania in 2003.

"It was now white," Del Ponte writes. "Despite the fact that investigators discovered traces of yellow paint on it, the owner denied it was ever repainted."

In its vicinity, investigators found pieces of gauze, used syringes, two plastic IV solution bags "petrified in mud", empty medicine bottles, including muscle relaxants used during the butcheries.

Inside the house itself, forensics discovered traces of blood on the walls and on the floor in one of the rooms. A section of the floor, size 180 by 60 centimeters, was clean.

"The owner of the house offered a series of explanations to the investigators when it came to the origin of the blood traces. First, he said that his wife gave birth in that room many years ago. But when the wife gave her statement and said that all their children were born elsewhere, he claimed that his family used the room to slaughter animals in order to celebrate Muslim holidays," Del Ponte writes.

The Albanian 'prosecutor' who accompanied them, according to Del Ponte, "revealed a whole other dimension of the problems in cooperation."

"He bragged about his cousins who are KLA members and told the Tribunal investigator: 'There are no graves of Serbs here. But, if they took the Serbs across the border from Kosovo and killed them, they did the right thing'," recounts Del Ponte.

Describing detailed information she has on the matter, Del Ponte writes that detectives had to give up on this case because further investigation had proved "impossible".

Families of the Kosovo Serb Victims to Sue Del Ponte

On March 23, Tanjug reported that the Association of the Families of Missing Kosovo Serbs said it will file a lawsuit against Del Ponte.

The announcement came Sunday after new details emerged from the former chief Hague Tribunal prosecutor's new book, which shed new light on the grim fate of the Serbs still missing from the province.

The Association's president, Simo Spasic, said the families will sue the Swiss prosecutor for covering up the crimes committed against the Serbs kidnapped and killed by Kosovo Albanian terrorists since the end of the 1999 war.

"In 2004, Del Ponte told us in The Hague that she had information that all Serbs kidnapped in Kosovo were later murdered, but she kept silent about her knowledge that before they died their organs were removed," Simic told the Podgorica daily Dan.

"Del Ponte hid the truth and left this information about the horrific crimes committed against the kidnapped Serbs out, in this way helping the crime, although she received the list of names of those kidnapped and those who kidnapped them in 2001. She never arrested anyone and she must account for this," Spasic said.

He said it is impermissible to have a chief prosecutor do nothing, although she knew the names of the Serbs who were abducted in their land, in front of their homes and in their farms, to later have their organs carved out and killed in the end.

"Del Ponte needs to explain why there were no convictions of the KLA leaders and why she never stopped it, the butchering of our loved ones for their organs, when she had information from many sources, Deutsche Welle, Sky News, BBC journalists, who said KLA was securing the transport of the kidnapped Kosovo Serbs to Albania," Spasic said.

More than 1,300 Kosovo Serbs are still missing from the southern Serbian province.