Del Ponte wants to look into organ trafficking

Former war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte says she would like to investigate allegations of organ trafficking in Kosovo.

In an interview with the Zurich-based newspaper, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, on Tuesday, the Swiss lawyer said she would be able to tackle the task quickly.

Del Ponte served as prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) from 1999 to 2007.

In 2008 she published a memoir called “The Hunt: Me and War Criminals”. In it she wrote about the smuggling of organs taken from murdered Serb civilians after the end of the Kosovo war in 1999.

“I mentioned the facts in the book so that somebody could carry out the investigations that we could not,” Del Ponte told the NZZ.

After her work on the tribunal was finished, Del Ponte went on to become the Swiss ambassador to Argentina – a post that she is about to leave when she retires.

This would leave her with time to look into the report filed by Swiss colleague and Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty last December.

“Personally, it would appeal to me to take over these Kosovo investigations,” Del Ponte said.

According to Marty’s report, leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, including current Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, harvested the organs of prisoners to sell on the international black market.