Category: Balkans

The men, including a former senior Kosovan Health Ministry official, promised poor people from Moldova, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkey up to €14,500 (£12,300) for their organs.

Those who received the organs – including patients from Canada, Germany, Poland and Israel – paid between €80,000 and €100,000 for them, Ratel said. The victims, however, were never paid, the European Union prosecutor Jonathan Ratel told Pristina District Court.

He alleged that the “organ-harvesting ring” recruited about 20 foreign nationals with false promises of payments in 2008.

The seven men have pleaded not guilty to charges ranging from trafficking in persons to unlawful practices of medicine and abuse of power. Two other suspects, a Turkish and an Israeli national, remain at large.

The prosecution has alleged that Kosovo surgeon Lutfi Dervishi, who is also linked to the Kosovo Liberation Army’s alleged kidnapping and killing of Serb civilians for their organs, is the ringleader of the group.

According to the court’s indictment, he attended a medical conference in Turkey in 2006 and asked for someone who could perform organ transplants. He was contacted by a Turkish man, Dr. Yusuf Sonmez, six months later.

Mr Dervishi and Dr Sonmez then allegedly carried out operations in a private medical clinic in the capital, Pristina, run by Mr Dervishi’s son, Arban, who has also been indicted.

The indictment says an Israeli citizen, Moshe Harel, was allegedly involved in identifying, recruiting and transporting victims and “ensuring the delivery of cash payments prior to surgery.”

Four other Kosovans, doctors Sokol Hajdini and Driton Jilta, and anaesthetists, Islam Bytyqi and Sylejman Dulla, are also indicted.

Dr Sonmez and Mr Harel are listed as wanted by Interpol.

Police were alerted to the network in November 2008, when a Turkish man, Yilmaz Altun, appeared exhausted at Pristina airport while waiting to board a flight home. When questioned by police, he said he had donated his kidney to an Israeli recipient. Kosovo law forbids the removal and transplant of organs.

All have denied the Kosovo court’s accusations.

Allegations of the Kosovo Liberation Army’s alleged trade in civilian organs stem from a book by U.N. War Crimes tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, based on information she has said she received from Western journalists.

In response to the allegations, Swiss senator Dick Marty led a Council of Europe team of investigators to Kosovo and Albania in 2009.

The council’s report is to be released to the public in France on Thursday.

The two year Council of Europe investigation also alleged that Kosovo’s prime minister, Hashim Thaci, was the head of an organised crime ring in the late 1990s that was involved in organ trafficking, assassinations and other crimes.

According to the draft report, Western powers were complicit in ignoring the activities of the crime ring headed by Mr Thaci.

“Thaci and these other ‘Drenica Group’ members are consistently named as ‘key players’ in intelligence reports on Kosovo’s mafia-like structures of organised crime,” the report said.

“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 … Hashim Thaci.”

In an interview yesterday before the report was released, Mr Thaci said he would not tolerate corruption in his government.

Kosovo’s government on Tuesday described the report as baseless and defamatory.

via Kosovo physicians accused of organ trafficking racket – Telegraph.

By DAN BILEFSKY

Published: November 15, 2010

PRAGUE — At least seven people have been charged with participating in an international organ-trafficking network based in Kosovo that sold kidneys and other organs from impoverished victims for up to $200,000 to patients from as far away as Israel and Canada, police and senior European Union officials said Monday.

According to the indictment, the traffickers lured people from slums in Istanbul, Moscow, Moldova and Kazakhstan with promises of up to $20,000 for their organs. Law enforcement officials say many never received a cent. The operations were performed at a private clinic in a run-down neighborhood on the outskirts of Pristina, the Kosovar capital.

While the ring was first discovered two years ago, the global scale of the network and its victims is only now becoming clear.

Officials said the ringleader was a highly regarded surgeon and professor at Pristina University Hospital, Dr. Lutfi Dervishi. The clinic was run by his son, Arban. Also charged was Ilir Rrecaj, a senior official in Kosovo’s Health Ministry when the ring was broken. They and two others are accused of crimes including trafficking in humans and body parts, unlawful medical activity, participating in organized crime, and abuse of office. All were released on bail.

The charges have shaken Kosovo, which has been struggling to integrate with the West since it declared independence from Serbia in February 2008. The case is also a test of the nascent legal institutions and rule of law as Kosovo seeks to overcome a culture of endemic lawlessness and corruption that has reached the highest levels of government.

The trafficking network’s tentacles reached far. Warrants were issued for a Turkish doctor and an Israeli financier, and two other doctors, an Israeli and a Turk, were named as co-conspirators.

The police said the ring had its roots at a medical conference in 2006 in Istanbul, where Dr. Dervishi met the Turkish doctor being sought, Yusuf Sonmez. Law enforcement officials describe Dr. Sonmez as a notorious international organ trafficker.

The Medicus clinic had been founded by a European philanthropist who aided ethnic Albanian doctors during the war in Kosovo in 1999. Dr. Dervishi, police officials said, secretly transformed it into a hub for illegal organ transplants, which were performed by Dr. Sonmez.

The indictment was first reported by The Associated Press. In it, a European Union prosecutor, Jonathan Ratel, said that in 2008, 20 foreign nationals living in “extreme poverty or acute financial distress” were “recruited with the false promises of payments.”

The police said they broke the ring in November of that year, when a young Turkish man, Yilman Altun, was found at the Pristina airport, weak and frail. Mr. Altun told the police that his kidney had been stolen. When the police raided the Medicus clinic, they discovered an elderly Israeli man who had received Mr. Altun’s kidney.

European Union officials said that the indictment in the case had been filed in district court in Kosovo and that a preliminary hearing was expected by the end of the year. If a judge confirms the charges, a trial will follow.

The European Union has a large law enforcement mission in Kosovo to combat crime and corruption. But that fight has proved difficult, with suspicions of bribes, money laundering, organized crime, fraud and now organ trafficking, ensnaring high-level government officials.

Several countries are examining the Kosovo ring, with police investigators combing through the phone records, computer hard drives and bank transfers of those charged. European Union officials said the recipients paid for the kidneys by bank transfers, helping lead the police to the main suspects.

Western law enforcement officials said they suspected the ring might be part of a larger criminal network whose nexus was in Israel. In September, five doctors from South Africa were charged with participating in an international kidney-trading syndicate in which dozens of poor Brazilians and Romanians were paid for kidneys for wealthy Israelis. Analysts said the organ-trafficking case was part of a disturbing global trend in which unscrupulous traffickers take advantage of the growing waiting lists of desperate patients and the vulnerability of poor people further buffeted by the international financial crisis.

In the United States, more than 109,000 people are on the waiting list for organ transplants, mostly kidneys, and 18 die each day, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which manages the American transplant system.

A version of this article appeared in print on November 16, 2010, on page A4 of the New York edition.

via 7 Charged in Kosovo-Based Organ-Trafficking Ring – NYTimes.com.

Five people, including a former senior health ministry official and a surgeon, have been charged  in connection with an international organ trafficking network.

”]Eulex, the police and justice mission in Kosovo, said the group were charged with offences of trafficking in human organs, organised crime and abusing official authority, while two others had also been charged with unlawful exercise of medical activities.

“The defendants include a number of doctors and one individual who previously worked at a senior level in the ministry of health,” it said in a statement on Friday.

In an indictment seen by the Associated Press, the group of suspects are accused of trafficking people into Kosovo for the purpose of removing “human organs for transplant to other persons”.

Some 20 foreign nationals “were recruited with false promises of payments” in 2008, Jonathan Ratel, the EU prosecutor wrote in the document.

It said the victims, some 20 foreign nationals, included people from Moldova, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkey who lived in “extreme poverty or acute financial distress”.

Private clinic

They were promised up to $20,000, while recipients were required to pay between $110,000-$137,000.

The group of suspects includes five Kosovan nationals and a Turkish doctor and an Israeli citizen who are both wanted by Interpol. None of the suspects are in custody.

The Turkish doctor named by the indictment, is said to be the subject of several criminal proceedings in other countries for human trafficking and removal of organs.

It also alleged that a Kosovo surgeon was one of the five charged with trafficking human organs, saying that he had carried out the operations in a private medical clinic called “Medicus”.

In 2008 investigators closed down the private health clinic where the doctors worked as part of the initial investigation.

Kosovo police launched a raid triggered by suspicions that a Turkish man had sold his kidney to an Israeli recipient after he appeared fatigued at Pristina airport trying to board a flight to Turkey.

The man told Kosovo police at the airport he came to the Balkan country to donate his kidney on invitation from the private clinic.

When police searched the clinic in November 2008 they found an Israeli citizen in post-operative care, according to the indictment.

EU officials said the indictment was filed in a local court, and a preliminary hearing is expected to be held by the end of the month.

via Kosovo ‘organ trafficking’ exposed – Europe – Al Jazeera English.