Serbia starts investigation into illegal transplantation
Itar-Tass - March 31, 2008 Monday 5:03 PM EST

BELGRADE March 31 - The prosecutor's office of Belgrade has started the checking of the report of Carla del Ponte, former chief prosecutor of the International Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, on "black transplantation", which could bring about the death of hundreds of Kosovo Serbs. According to her information, in 1999, when the armed conflict in Kosovo was in its peak, local militants took some 300 Serbs to the northern part of Albania. The human organs, taken from them, were delivered to the West by the contraband channels for transplantation. Carla del Ponte, who resigned from her post late in 2007, wrote about it in her memoirs. They will be brought out soon, but fragments of the book have already been published by some Western and Serb mass media.

According to Carla del Ponte, she had at her disposal "serious evidence" proving the fact that those heinous crimes had really been committed, but the political situation in Kosovo and Metohija had not permitted to conduct an investigation. Now, some nine years after those developments, experts from Belgrade are going to do the investigation. Carla del Ponte may be invited to take part in it as a witness.

The Union of Physicians of Kosovo and Metohija appealed to the World Health Organisation (WHO) to take part in the investigation. Milan Jakovlevic, its president, said that they had suggested to WHO to interrogate foreign medics, who had worked in Kosovo and Metohija late in the 90s. Marko Jaksic, director of a hospital in Kosovska Mitrovica, and Rado Traikovic, director of a hospital in Gracanica, say that they heard rumours about such criminal transplantology in the concentration camps, created by Kosovo Albanians, in 1999, but that time it was not established whether they were true or not.

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