Del Ponte regrets lack of evidence in organ harvesting case

Del Ponte regrets lack of evidence in organ harvesting case

BELGRADE -- Carla Del Ponte expressed regret today that an EU team headed by U.S. prosecutor John Clint Williamson was unable to find sufficient evidence in their probe.

They looked into allegations of human organ trafficking in Kosovo.

“It is more difficult to do a proper investigation after so many years” and I am not surprised about that, Del Ponte, a former chief prosecutor of the Hague Tribunal (ICTY) said in a telephone statement for Tanjug, adding that the ICTY had not been able to conduct an investigation as “nobody was helping at all.”

She expressed the hope that sufficient evidence would be found to file organ trafficking charges in the future.

Del Ponte pointed to the fact that Williamson, head of a special task force investigating the 1999 case of human organ trafficking in Kosovo and Metohija, had told a press conference in Brussels today that he believed the organ trafficking had indeed taken place.

Del Ponte first made claims about Kosovo Albanians smuggling human organs of kidnapped Serbs in her book "The Hunt: Me and the War Criminals" published in April 2008, after she resigned as ICTY chief prosecutor.

She alleged that ICTY investigators and UNMIK officials had obtained the information that in the summer of 1999, Kosovo Albanians had loaded over 300 abducted and captured civilians, mainly Serbs and a small number of Roma and Albanians, in trucks bound for Burrel (central Albania), to kill them there for the purpose of extracting their organs and transporting them via the Tirana International Airport to be sold abroad.

However, all the eight witnesses mentioned by Del Ponte went missing, and...