Lavrov Doubts Probe Into Alleged Wartime Human Organ Trafficking In Kosovo Will Be Ended

Fakhir Rizvi Published March 22, 2019 | 11:44 AM

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov does not believe that the international investigation into the alleged wartime human organ trafficking in Kosovo will ever deliver any feasible results because Western countries will continue to cover up crimes against humanity committed by them or their allies

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 22nd March, 2019) Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov does not believe that the international investigation into the alleged wartime human organ trafficking in Kosovo will ever deliver any feasible results because Western countries will continue to cover up crimes against humanity committed by them or their allies.

The Russian top diplomat recalled that a special court had been created to look into a report claiming that the ethnic-Albanian militia Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) kidnapped people to sell their organs, but the court had not been working for several years already, as new prosecutors in charge come and go, and no charges had been brought against anybody.

"A prosecutor was appointed, a US citizen, by the way ... Since then, the prosecutor has been changed twice, a third prosecutor, another American, is working now and no charges have been brought. I even doubt that the investigation is being carried out in an adequate manner. So the West will be swiping under the carpet those facts that implicate it and its puppets in crimes against humanity," Lavrov said in an interview for a documentary for the Russian NTV broadcaster.

In 2008, Carla Del Ponte, a ex-prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, published a book, in which she claimed that several hundred non-Albanians had been smuggled from Kosovo in the late 1990s into Albania for the illegal removal and sale of their organs.

Moreover, Swiss politician Dick Marty in 2010 alleged in his report for the Council of Europe that serious crimes had been committed during the 1998-1999 Kosovo War, including trafficking in human organs, with the involvement of the KLA and people close to incumbent Kosovo President Hashim Thaci.

The Kosovo war involved confrontation between the KLA, which was striving to achieve the independence of Kosovo, where tensions between the Albanian and Serbian communities were high, and the forces of then-united Serbia and Montenegro.

Kosovo eventually unilaterally proclaimed its independence in 2008 and received wide international recognition.