http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/foreign/harrydequetteville/april08/revelations. htm
DAILY TELEGRAPH BLOGS (UK) Harry de Quetteville in Berlin Revelations in Carla del Ponte's book Posted by Harry de Quetteville on 11 Apr 2008 at 10:04 I have written in today's paper about the revelations from Carla del Ponte's new book "The Hunt: Me and War criminals". I wanted to talk to her before writing the piece, but was unable to get an interview. Carla del Ponte's book on sale in Rome Some readers of this blog have already posted snippets of the book in their comments. Most of these excerpts - translated from the original Italian - have come from Serb media outlets - perhaps not the most objective source for a story about Serbs being tortured. So with the help of our Rome correspondent, Malcolm Moore, I have put together a transcription of the relevant parts of CdP's book for those interested parties. In it she reports allegations made by several sources that KLA fighters, at a senior level, had authorised and profited from an organ-harvesting racket preying on Serbs transported from Kosovo. It is worth remembering she got the information they provided through UN officials and "trusted journalists" not from the sources themselves. Here it is uncut for you to judge. In a chapter entitled: Kosovo 1999-2007, she writes: "The prosecutors office received information which UNMIK officials had received from a team of trustworthy journalists that during the summer months of 1999 Kosovan Albanians had transported 300 kidnapped people from Kosovo to Albania. "These prisoners were initially held in sheds and other structures in Kukes and Tropoje [Harry's note - north-eastern Albania]. According to the journalists' sources, who were only identified as Kosovo Albanians, some of the younger and fitter prisoners were visited by doctors and were never hit. "They were transferred to other detention camps in Burrel and the neighbouring area, one of which was a barracks behind a yellow house 20 km behind the town. "One room inside this yellow house, the journalists said, was kitted out as a makeshift operating theatre, and it was here that surgeons transplanted the organs of prisoners. These organs, according to the sources, were then sent to Rinas airport, Tirana, to be sent to surgical clinics abroad to be transplanted to paying patients. "One of the informers had personally carried out a shipment to the airport. "The victims, deprived of a kidney, were then locked up again, inside the barracks, until the moment they were killed for other vital organs. In this way, the other prisoners in the barracks were aware of the fate that awaited them, and according to the source, pleaded, terrified to be killed immediately. "Among the prisoners who were taken to these barracks were women from Kosovo, Albania, Russia and other Slavic countries. Two of the source said that they helped to bury the corpses of the dead around the yellow house and in a neighbouring cemetery. "According to the sources, the organ smuggling was carried out with the knowledge and active involvement of middle and high ranking involvement from the KLA. "The tribunal investigators discovered that even if the information for the journalists was tear-jerking, the details were coherent within themselves and confirmed information directly gathered by the tribunal. "'The material within [from the office of the court] does not contain specific material from Albania; but a low number of witness statements and other material we have confirms and to a certain extent amplifies the stated information,' I noted in a memo on this activity. "'All the individuals whom the sources cite as present in the Albanian camps in the summer of 1999 were declared to be lost in the summer of 1999 and had never been seen since then.' "The implications were obvious; 'Given the extremely grave nature of the these cases, the fact that practically none of the bodies of the victims of the KLA were found in the exhumations in Kosovo and the fact that these atrocities would have been committed under the supervision or command of the leadership of the KLA at the medium or high level, they should be investigated in the most thorough way possible by professional investigators and experts.' "The victims of these cases were probably seized after the end of the NATO air campaign in a period in which Kosovo was overrun with foreign peacekeepers and legions of investigators and representatives from Human Right operations. It was not clear whether crimes committed in this arc of time fell under the mandate of the tribunal. "The prosecutors office should have asked for the names of the sources from the journalists and UNMIK as well as any other information they had on this case." In a second passage Ms del Ponte goes on to relate a visit to the alleged organ surgery in Burrel, Albania "a few months" after October 2002, presumably in early 2003. She writes: "A few months after [October 2002] the investigators of the tribunal and UNMIK reached central Albania and the yellow house which the journalists sources had revealed as the place where the prisoners were killed to transplant their organs. The journalists and the Albanian prosecutor accompanied the investigators on to the site. "The house was now white. The owner denied it had ever been repainted even though investigators found traces of yellow along the base of its walls. "Inside the investigators found pieces of gauze, a used syringe and two plastic IV bags encrusted with mud and empty bottles of medicine, some of which was of a muscle relaxant often used in surgical operations. "The application of a chemical substance revealed to the scientific team traces of blood on the walls and on the floor of a room inside the house, except for in a clean area of the floor sized 180x60cm. "The owner offered a variety of explanations for the bloodstains over the course of the two days the investigators spent in the village. "Initially he said that many years ago his wife had given birth in that room then when his wife said she had her children elsewhere he asserted that the family had used the building to butcher animals for a Muslim festival. "It is tempting to draw conclusions from these investigations, combined with the fragmentary testimony from the journalists. Stories of prisoners killed by organ traffickers circulate in many conflict areas, but rarely is it possible to find concrete proof which would separate these tales from urban legend. "The syringes, the iv solution bags, the gauze are clearly material which confirms the tales, but as proof they are unfortunately insufficient. The investigators were not able to determine whether the traces they found were of human blood. The sources did not indicated the position of the grave of the presumed victims and so we did not find the bodies."
