Kosovo President Arrested By Special Prosecutors In The Hague - Kosovo Specialist Chambers

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 06th November, 2020) President of the self-proclaimed Republic of Kosovo Hashim Thaci, who resigned on Thursday over a war crimes indictment filed against him, has been arrested in The Hague, the Kosovo Specialist Chambers (KSC) said.

"Following their arrests by the Specialist Prosecutor on 4 and 5 November, Hashim Thaci, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi were transferred to the Detention Facilities of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers (KSC) in The Hague on 4 and 5 November," KSC said in a statement on late Thursday.

The KSC and the Specialist Prosecutor's Office (SPO) began working in 2017 with a mandate to investigate alleged war crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an Albanian separatist paramilitary movement which sought Kosovo's secession from what was then Yugoslavia during the 1998-1999 war and merger into what they hoped would become Greater Albania.

More than 200 former KLA militias were questioned by the court from 2018-2019. The crimes being clarified included murder, torture, abduction, trafficking of human organs and drug trafficking, as flagged in a report by Council of Europe Special Representative Dick Marty in 2011.

In November, Serbia gave the KSC and SPO materials containing information about 160 secret UCK prisons where war crimes were committed against Yugoslav Serbians.