PRISTINA, Kosovo — Kosovo’s Prime Minister Hashim Thaci said Thursday that a report suggesting he was the head of a criminal gang behind a grisly trade in the kidneys of slain civilian detainees was “monstrous” and “scandalous.”
Thaci, who made his first public appearance since the publication of the report by Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty, said the allegations were aimed at damaging Kosovo’s image internationally.
“The world knows who was the aggressor and who were the victims in Kosovo,” Thaci said referring to crimes committed by former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic against ethnic Albanians during the 1998-1999 war. “These tendencies to change history, to equate the aggressor and the victim … will fail again.”
In an address broadcast live on Kosovo’s public television, the former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army said he felt “deeply offended” by the allegations.
“As prime minister, citizen of Kosovo and a father, I feel deeply offended,” Thaci said. “Truth and justice are on our side.”
Dick Marty, a Swiss senator, told reporters in Paris that “inhuman” treatment of people and illicit trafficking of human organs in the immediate aftermath of the country’s war for independence from Serbia remains unpunished.
Marty’s report, made public Tuesday, alleged that civilian detainees of the KLA rebels were shot to death to sell their kidneys on the black market and suggested that Thaci was once the “boss” of a criminal underworld behind the trafficking.