Harvesting organs and gruesome details in Kosovo

Gruesome details on organ harvesting in Albania during the 1998-99 conflict in Kosovo are emerging at a war crime court proceeding in Belgrade. In an interview broadcasted live, a witness who was haphazardly trained for medical procedures said that organs were taken from the bodies of prisoners, many of them Serbs, held by the former rebel Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in Albania. He explained the graphic procedure of cutting throats or chests, and pulled out hearts and other organs that they then put in cooling boxes that were taken to some Albanian army officials at the airport in Albania’s capital in Tirana. The box was given to a “foreigner” coming out from a “small private plane” with a Turkish flag, the witness said. The wartime organ harvesting case is believed to be linked to the so-called Medicus affair, another case of organ trafficking at a hospital in Pristina, another city in Kosovo. Several doctors are on trial before an EU-run court there on charges of illegally transplanting organs at the Medicus Clinic.

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