Kosovo PM Linked to Human Organ Trafficking, Council of Europe Says

Kosovo’s Prime Minister has been accused of connections with organised crime, including human organ-trafficking, in a Council of Europe report that will be discussed in its legal affairs committee tomorrow.

According to the report Hashim Thaci led the “Drenica Group” of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The group created a “power base in the organised criminal enterprises that were flourishing in Kosovo and Albania”. Thaci, and members of the Drenica Group “exerted violent control over the trade in heroin and other narcotics,” the report added. In the aftermath of the 1999 conflict, Thaci was “commonly identified, and cited in secret intelligence reports, as the most dangerous of the KLA’s ‘criminal bosses’, the report said.

During the conflict that finished in June 1999, the KLA used detention facilities in Albania, where prisoners were treated inhumanely. Between July 1999 and mid 2000, scores of “disappeared” people were held in several locations in Albania. An international organ-trafficking ring extracted kidneys of a small number of them. All of those people are believed to be killed. Thaci’s operations had the support and complicity of Albania’s government and secret services and the Albanian mafia.

Between 1998 and 2000, Thaci and other members of his inner circle were linked to “having ordered – and in some cases personally overseen – assassinations, detentions, beatings and interrogations” in various parts of Kosovo during KLA-led operations in Albania. In intelligence reports, Thaci and members of the Drenica Group have been named “key players” of Kosovo’s mafia-like structures of organised crime, according to the report, which was put together by Council of Europe rapporteur, Swiss Senator Dick Marty.

Thaci “secured political and diplomatic endorsement from the United States and other Western powers, as the preferred domestic partner in their foreign policy project in Kosovo”. The political support gave Thaci “a sense of being ‘untouchable’ and an unparalleled viability as Kosovo’s post-war leader-in-waiting,” the report said.

Kosovo’s government dismissed the claims in a statement that was published by the British newspaper the Guardian, saying the allegations were not based on facts. On December 12, Kosovo held its first elections since its self-declared independence from Serbia in 2008, elections which Thaci won.

To see a map of KLA’s detention facilities in Albania, click here.

Ali Sheikholeslami, euronews correspondent in London

Copyright © 2012 euronews