Marty: I didn’t directly accuse Thaci

19 January 2011 | 10:45 | Source: B92, Beta

PRIŠTINA -- Council of Europe Rapporteur Dick Marty says he did not claim that it was Kosovo Albanian PM Hashim Thaci who took part in the human organ trafficking. Dick Marty (Tanjug, file) “If you read the report carefully, I never decidedly say that Mr. Thaci directly took part in the organ trade,” the CoE rapporteur stressed. “I say that people very close to Mr. Thaci took part in it. It’s hard to believe that he has never heard about it,” he added. “Unlike Mrs. Carla Del Ponte I specify many aspects. I don’t speak about hundreds of illegal transplants, I speak about several cases,” Marty told Radio Television of Kosovo. He pointed out that he could not talk about the investigation into the organ trafficking that had been conducted by the Hague Tribunal and EULEX, adding that his report did not criminalize the entire Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). “In my opinion, however, there was abuse and crimes that were committed by some groups that, in my opinion, should be subject of the investigation,” the CoE rapporteur explained. “Simply said, there was no real investigation into the events. I was told by the justice and interior ministers that Albania thought that there was no reason to launch an investigation into possible cases in its territory since it assessed that there had not been any conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and therefore did not see any reason or motive to open up an investigation,” he stressed. Marty has rejected statements of some Serbian judiciary officials that he based his report on the investigation and information of the Serbian prosecution and Serbian state authorities. He pointed out that he was very critical towards them and that it would be much better if those institutions did their job and worried less about public relations. “I give you my word that not a single piece of material from Serbia could not have been used and that I didn’t use it (to make the report). I also want to say that I did not talk about Kosovo for one second while I visited Russia as a president of the Monitoring Committee,” the CoE rapporteur concluded.  “Thaci, Drenica Group key players” “Thaci and these other 'Drenica Group' members are consistently named as 'key players' in intelligence reports on Kosovo’s mafia-like structures of organized crime. I have examined these diverse, voluminous reports with consternation and a sense of moral outrage,” Marty wrote in his report, which is available in full here. "Specifically, in our determination, the leaders of the 'Drenica Group' seem to bear the greatest responsibility for two sets of unacknowledged crimes described in this report: for running the KLA’s ad hoc network of detention facilities on the territory of Albania and for determining the fate of the prisoners who were held in those facilities, including the many abducted civilians brought over the border into Albania from Kosovo," reads the report. Thaci is mentioned thus: "We found that the 'Drenica Group' had as its chief – or, to use the terminology of organised crime networks, its 'boss' – the renowned political operator and perhaps most internationally recognised personality of the KLA, Hashim Thaci".