KOSOVO – The Associated Press is reporting that the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo, EULEX, has named a US prosecutor to investigate claims brought forth by a Swiss lawyer that Prime Minister Hashim Thaci led a criminal network that sold organs of civilian captives during the 1998-1999 Kosovo war.
John Clint Williamson who currently serves as a Special Expert to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, served previously as the United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues.
Williamson will be in charge to investigate the claims brought forth in a draft report presented in December 2010 by the Swiss Dick Marty, member of the Council of Europe.
In the report Marty claims that Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci was a leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an ethnic Kosovar-Albanian guerrilla which was behind the trafficking.
The report implies that Albanian organized crime may be involved even today, in trafficking. It also cites evidence of organ trafficking in Kosovo and brutal treatment of some 500 Kosovo Serb prisoners before they disappeared, by members of KLA.
Marty, a lawyer from canton Ticino, is known for taking on tough subjects such as uncovering the CIA flights over Europe which cemented his reputation.
Links to other sites: draft report on COE web site, GenevaLunch’s background, EULEX
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A drug bust this past weekend in Geneva resulted in five people arrested and 10 kilos of cocaine seized.
According to information first presented by the Tribune de Genève, and confirmed by Geneva prosecutor, Adrian Holloway, a Spanish national and four Colombians were arrested for their alleged involvement in the trafficking network.
According to Holloway, a forty-year-old Spaniard driving a car with Vaud license plates was detained in the early hours of Sunday 17 April at the Mategnin border with France. He was reportedly carrying 10 kilos of cocaine in the car.
The man was being followed very closely by another driver, a Colombian national, who was then arrested by authorities. The individual is suspected of being the leader of the trafficking gang.
Two more men were arrested in Geneva and one woman was arrested in Fribourg in connection with the bust, all Colombian nationals allegedly tied to a drug trafficking network in their country of origin.
Dick Marty, Swiss rapporteur for the Council of Europe (photo, COE)
Brussels, Belgium and Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Evidence of organ trafficking in Kosovo and brutal treatment of some 500 Kosovo Serb prisoners before they disappeared, by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), are two of the damning details that are part of a report made public 14 December by the Council of Europe.
The draft report, by Dick Marty, member of the Council of Europe from Switzerland, was published on the COE’s web site Tuesday with the agreement of the chair of the legal affairs committee Christos Pourgourides.
Among its allegations: Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci was a leader of the ethnic Kosovar-Albanian guerrilla group KLA that was behind the trafficking. The report implies that Albanian organized crime may be involved even today in trafficking.
The long-awaited report, which was undertaken by Marty in July 2008, was the result of allegations of prisoner abuse and trafficking in human organs made in her memoirs in 2008 by Carla Del Ponte, former chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The book provoked heated debate at the time, not least because De Ponte, despite her position, seemed to show little or no official followup by national and international authorities of crimes of which she had some knowledge.
The new report, the COE says in its introductory remarks, shows why: international organizations were overwhelmed and under-staffed at the end of the war in former Yugoslavia, details that surfaced 10 years after the facts were hard to verify, and rumours were rife. The new report promises to provoke yet more debate, at the very least, given the council’s strong words:
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Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Geneva and Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission launched a major information campaign 13 September in Ciudad Juarez, in the state of Chihuahua, after the two signed an agreement to fight human trafficking and kidnapping in Mexico. Criminal gangs in Mexico have been taking hostages and holding them for US$500-3,000 ransoms, to finance their activities.
Migrant workers heading north to the US have been targets and when their families do not pay the ransoms they are sometimes murdered by the hostage-takers, often in large groups, such as in the recent mass murder of 72 migrants in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, along the Mexican Northern Border.
The human rights commission estimates that some 10,000 migrants were victims of kidnapping over a period of six months in 2009, but the figure is widely considered to be higher than that. Most of the kidnapping victims are migrants from Central America, mainly Honduras and Guatemala, according to the IOM.
The information campaign is part of IOM’s regional counter-trafficking project, which is funded by the US State Department Bureau of Population Refugees and Migration. Mexico is the fifth country in the region to launch the regional campaign; the other countries are Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua.
Television and radio spots, as well as a radio soap opera, will carry the message to audiences in the northern and southern border cities of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua and Tapachula, Chiapas, cities where IOM has sub-offices and carries out anti trafficking activities.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Customs officials at Cointrin International Airport found 125kg of khat (qat) in the suitcases of three people arriving from London, a man who is Estonian but resident in London and two Hungarian women.
The stimulant is legal in some countries but illegal elsewhere, including in most of Europe. The WHO has listed it as a drug of abuse since 1980. The three said they were transporting the khat for Africans and had been instructed to wait for phone calls once they reached Geneva. The man was carrying 45kg and the two women 80kg of the substance, say police.
The three were imprisoned, charged with drug trafficking.
West and Central Africa appear to the be source of a sharp increase since 2008 in illegal trade in ivory, with China as the main destination, according to Traffic, a group that monitors ivory trade. Trafficking has doubled, the group reports. The suspected increase is based on quantities of ivory seized, which are likely only a fraction of the traffic, the group says. No explanation is given for the increase, but the analysis was done in advance of a Cites meeting to review ivory trade. Cites, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, is an international agreement to which countries are signatories.
Samantha Orobator of the UK was given a life sentence for drug trafficking rather than the usual death penalty, and it appears she may be able to serve her sentence in the UK, reports the Telegraph, UK. She was charged with carrying 680 grams of heroin when she tried to board a flight from Laos to Thailand in August 2008. While Laos sentences people to death for drugs there have reportedly been no executions since 1989. Orobator became pregnant while in prison, but little information about her situation has been made public.
Mexican police are staging one of their biggest operations in years to try “to prevent a collapse in law and order just south of the US border,” reports Reuters. Ciudad Juarez, a desert city just south of El Paso, Texas, has been the scene for several months of a bloody war between police and drug cartels working with corrupt police officers. The city is at the heart of a major drug trafficking route.
