US prosecutor to head Kosovo organ trafficking investigation

US prosecutor John Clint Williamson was appointed on Monday as the head of a team investigating accusations against Kosovo's prime minister.

(AP, AFP, DPA, VOA, Deuitsche Welle, BBC, The Independent, B92, EULEX - 29/08/11)

US prosecutor John Clint Williamson (right) will lead the Kosovo organ trafficking investigation. [Reuters]

EULEX named a former US ambassador-at-large for war crimes as head of a group tasked with investigating allegations linking Kosovo officials to organ trafficking on Monday (August 29th).

"John Clint Williamson from the United States has been appointed lead prosecutor for the EULEX Special Investigative Task Force," the official announcement said.

The team will look into accusations against former senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) levelled in a report by Council of Europe (CoE) rapporteur Dick Marty in December.

The 27-page paper alleged that a group, headed by incumbent Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci and including other former KLA commanders, was behind a host of crimes committed during and after the 1998-1999 conflict in Kosovo. Those included abductions, detentions, assassinations, drugs smuggling, as well as "forcible extraction of human organs for the purposes of trafficking," the report claimed.

It accused Thaci of having "personally ordered -- and in some cases personally overseen" the perpetration of some of the crimes committed during the latest war in the Balkans.

The paper alleged that the network ran detention camps in northern Albania, near its border with Kosovo, and sold organs of civilian captives on the black market to raise funds for the KLA's fight against Serbian forces.

Several weeks following the report's release, EULEX initiated in late January a preliminary investigation into the case.

While denying the accusations, Thaci has pledged full co-operation in the probe.

EULEX said that the investigations conducted thus far have failed to produce any evidence in support of the organ trafficking allegations.

Williamson, 50, served as prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia from 1994 to 2001. The cases he handled included that against former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.

The task force includes about two dozen investigators and justice workers and will also have an office in Brussels, the AP reported.

Officials in Belgrade, which was pushing earlier this year for the establishment of an independent investigative mechanism by the UN Security Council to examine the allegations in Marty's report, welcomed EULEX's announcement.

Serbian War Crimes Prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic praised Williamson for his contribution to the solving of war crimes cases stemming from the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s. Belgrade-based B92 also quoted him as saying that he held the American prosecutor in exceptionally high esteem as a professional.

While welcoming EULEX's announcement, Serbia's Minister for Kosovo Goran Bogdanovic, expressed some reservations.

"I want to believe the investigation will be unbiased, despite the fact that there is already some pessimism, since the man who was appointed is potentially someone the Serbs do not trust," he was quoted as telling Serbia's Tanjug news agency.

"Right now, the willingness to start the procedure has to be welcomed, so the crimes committed against the Serbs would finally be revealed and the criminals punished for their involvement in organ trafficking."

Source: SETimes.com