Europe’s leading human rights body began an investigation on Monday into allegations that Serbian civilians were abducted in Kosovo during the Kosovo War of 1998 to 1999 and taken to Albania, where their organs were extracted for sale before they were killed.
The inquiry by the Council of Europe, based in Strasbourg, France, is being led by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator, who previously investigated alleged secret CIA prisons in Europe used to interrogate terrorist suspects. The council said Marty would meet this week with leading war crimes officials and human rights groups in Serbia and Albania.
Distrust between the two groups remains high even a decade after the war, with each side accusing the other of atrocities. Serbian war crimes investigators are now alleging that up to 500 Serbs from Kosovo disappeared during the war, when ethnic Albanian guerrillas fought Serb forces under the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in a conflict over control of Kosovo that left 10,000 people dead, most of them ethnic Albanians.
Ethnic Albanian officials in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, have strenuously denied the allegations, saying they are politically motivated and aimed at undermining Kosovo, which defied Serbia by declaring independence last year.
Serbian investigators say they have evidence that at least 10 people were abducted by ethnic Albanian guerrillas as part of an alleged underground trafficking operation in which guerrillas made use of hidden hospitals in Albania to extract organs before dumping dead victims into mass graves.
The allegations surfaced last year in a memoir by Carla Del Ponte, the former chief UN prosecutor for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.
In the book, Del Ponte writes that credible witnesses and reports indicate that guerrillas killed hundreds of Serbian prisoners to sell their organs.
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