Top ex-Kosovo Fighters Incriminated in Organ Stealing, War Crimes

Several leaders of Kosovo's 1990s guerrilla army, some of them now senior officials, face possible indictment for crimes against humanity including murder and organ trafficking, an EU probe found Tuesday.

Releasing the first details of a two-year probe, Clint Williamson, the U.S. diplomat and prosecutor heading the inquiry into events after Kosovo's 1998-1999 war, said there was evidence "at this moment (for) ... one indictment that would include a number of individuals."

Since mid-2011, Williamson and a team of 25 prosecutors and investigators have been holed up in heavily guarded offices in Brussels to avoid what he termed as "the climate of intimidation" that has surrounded inquiries linked to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) that fought against Serb security forces.

After interviewing hundreds of witnesses and thumbing through thousands of pages on events that took place 15 years ago, "we believe that the Special Investigative Task Force will be in a position to file an indictment against certain senior officials of the former Kosovo Liberation Army," he said.

But before bringing alleged perpetrators to justice, Kosovo and the European Union need to agree on setting up a special court to hear the cases -- hopefully early next year.

This is because the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) based in The Hague could not prosecute charges related to the fate of hundreds of people who went missing or were killed in Kosovo in the chaos after the end of the war, in June 1999.

Williamson, whose mandate winds up next month, refused to give the names or numbers of those behind "a campaign of persecution" against ethnic Serbs, Roma and fellow Kosovo Albanians viewed as political opponents.

His Special Investigative Task Force (SITF) was set up after an explosive 2010 report alleged that senior KLA commanders -- including current Kosovo Premier Hashim Thaci -- removed organs from Serb and other prisoners of war and sold them on the black market.

"There are compelling indications that this practice did occur on a very limited scale and that a small number of individuals were killed for the purpose of extracting and trafficking their organs," Williamson told a news conference.

But he strongly denied reports in the Balkans that hundreds of people still listed as missing had been murdered for their organs, instead putting the number of victims of the gruesome traffic at around 10.

There was "no indication that a significant portion of the ethnic minorities who went missing or were killed were victims of this practice," Williamson said.

The 2010 report by Council of Europe rapporteur Dick Marty on the chaos in Kosovo in the aftermath of June 1999, also linked the KLA to Mafia-style crime.

"In the end this was solely about certain individuals in the KLA leadership using elements of that organization to perpetrate violence in order to obtain political power and personal wealth for themselves, not about any larger cause," Williamson said.

Violence against the minorities was not about defending Kosovo or fighting for freedom, Williamson said.

"We believe that the evidence is compelling that these crimes were not the acts of rogue individuals acting on their own accord, but rather that they were conducted in an organized fashion and were sanctioned by certain individuals in the top levels of the KLA leadership."

The KLA won the support of NATO after taking up arms against Serbian security forces. Thaci and his government have repeatedly dismissed charges of involvement.

In Pristina, the government of Kosovo said it would "continue collaborating" with the team "until the end of these investigations."

Williamson's report was an "important step for determining potential individual responsibility," it said.

In Serbia, which strongly backed Marty's report as independent proof of Belgrade's claims that KLA guerrillas killed and tortured hundreds of Serbs after the war, officials said Tuesday's developments would help in "finding those responsible for monstrous crimes."

"We can be satisfied only when court verdicts will be brought against those responsible for these crimes," Serbia's top official in charge of Kosovo, Marko Djuric, said in a statement.

Serbia's war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic described the report as "satisfaction for the victims and a great contribution for international justice."