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1 Apr, 2008 08:53

Exposed: how Kosovo Serbs were butchered for organs

Former Chief Prosecutor at the International Court of Justice in the Hague has given details of suspected atrocities by ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1999. Carla Del Ponte's book 'The Hunt: Me and War crimes' claims that before killing Serbs and members o

According to Del Ponte, a one-time prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the kidnapped Serbs were given a medical test. Those who passed were treated well, fed and looked after until they were brought under the surgeon’s knife.

From several concentration camps in Kosovo, they were then transferred to cities in the north of Albania. Their body parts were later flown to Europe.

General Mamir Stayanovich was head of the intelligence service of the Serbian army during the war.

He has no doubt that the claims in Del Ponte’s book will sooner or later be proven. The places she mentions as hidden operation rooms are in exactly the same location as the camps Albanians used for training soldiers.

“In these hospitals they decided amongst themsemselves what each commander of the KLA would have after victory. They decided who would make his money from drug dealing, who from weapons, and who from selling body parts. Hashim Thaci, the prime minister, was among them,” General Stayanovich claims.

There are more than 2,000 names on the list of missing Serbs. Sima Spasich is the leader of an organisation trying to discover their fate. He showed the pictures of body parts he filmed in 2003.

“Right after the war, when we understood that too many people had disappeared, I went to the K-For commanders and asked them where were the people, and they just shrugged their shoulders. Only after they saw Serbian people demonstrating and were afraid of their anger, they took me to some place,” Spasich said.

“I cannot explain what I saw there. It was a small mountain of pieces of bodies and the first thing I saw was a baby who’d been taken from his mother’s stomach, lying there. It was impossible to look. It was a massive grave they’d dug before. Today I know in this massive grave were 26 Serb bodies – also there was my brother Milosh,” Spasich added.

Families who once had a small glimmer of hope of finding their loved ones are now planning to sue Del Ponte. They claim she withheld this information for years – and in that way helped the criminals with their crime.

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