Kosovo Albania separatist leader plans to sue the European investigator whose report has found that he had civilian detainees killed for their kidneys when he was head of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Referred to as a ‘prime minister”, Hashim Thaci has contacted lawyers to pursue a libel suit against Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty, said a senior Kosovo Albanian separatist official.

Marty’s report concludes that Thaci was behind the trade of kidneys on the black market and that Thaci is the “boss” of a criminal underworld behind the alleged trade. The report says that Thaci controls weapons, drugs and other organized crime activities.

Kosovo’s separatist government that is led by Thaci branded the report as “baseless”.

Marty said his findings were based on testimonies of “KLA insider sources” such as drivers, bodyguards, and other “fixers” involved in logistical and practical tasks, as well as “organisers”, or the ringleaders behind the lucrative organ trade.

The accounts pointed to “a methodology by which all of the captives were killed, usually by a gunshot to the head, before being operated on to remove one or more of their organs”, the report said.

Thaci is a leader of a group of violent Albanian gunmen known as the KLA whose goal is to exterminate and ethnically cleanse Serbs out of Kosovo in order to create a pure Albanian Muslim state.

In 1999, US led a coalition of states to bomb Serbia over its crackdown of Thaci’s violent activities.

During the bombing, several US and western officials expressed sympathy for Thaci’s organized crime group.

“The United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA] stand for the same human values and principles … Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values,” said US Senator Joseph Lieberman in 1999.

US Senators like John McCain took part in a KLA-organized political fundraising and, like Lieberman, McCain was fervently in favor of bombing Serbia and Kosovo’s independence. McCain’s wife even met Thaci during her husband’s presidential campaign.

December 16, 2010
SERBIANNA

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