The Drenica Group
Crime gang allegedly headed by Prime Minister Thaci is said to have run a range of mafia-like enterprises, from cigarette smuggling to trafficking in organs.
Ex-KLA Fighter Detained Over Crimes in Albania
Kosovo court ordered a month’s detention for former Kosovo Liberation Army leader Xhemshit Krasniqi, suspected of carrying out war crimes in Albania.
A judge in the Basic Court of Mitrovica on Wednesday ordered 30 days of detention for former senior Kosovo Liberation Army fighter Xhemshit Krasniqi.
His lawyer Haji Millaku said the court acted on the request of EU rule-of-law mission, EULEX, citing fears that he could endanger investigations if he was free.
“He is held on suspicion that he committed war crimes in the spring of 1999 on the territory of Albania,” Millaku told BIRN.
Krasniqi, in the middle, during Kosovo conflict. Photo: Facebook
Krasniqi was arrested on Sunday in his hometown of Prizren in southern Kosovo during a police operation conducted by EULEX.
EULEX prosecutors suspect he committed war crimes against civilians detained in camps run by the KLA in northern Albania.
He was allegedly involved in torturing detainees in camps in Kukes and Cahan during April, May and June 1999, during the conflict in neighbouring Kosovo.
During the NATO bombing of former Yugoslavia, from March to June 1999, the KLA, then fighting Serbian police and military, had a base in the Albanian town of Kukes from where they conducted guerrilla operations across the border in Kosovo.
These held Kosovo Albanians suspected of collaboration, Serbs and Roma. Some detainees were tortured and it also believed that some were killed.
Serbian association of missing persons says some 500 Kosovo Serbs are still listed as missing.
A Council of Europe report from 2011 said KLA fighters used a former metal factory in Kukes and converted it into a multi-purpose facility, including at least two “cellblocks” to house detainees.
The same report said the prisoners “were thrown into makeshift cellblocks, left in insanitary conditions without food and water, and were visited periodically by KLA soldiers to be questioned under harsh treatment, or indiscriminately beaten”.
In statements given to UN prosecutors in 2009 and 2010, more than ten individuals – almost all of them ethnic Albanians – described having been detained indefinitely, struck with sticks and other objects, and subjected to various forms of inhuman treatment at the Kukes site.
Several witnesses stated that screams of agony from persons held in separate sets of cellblocks could be heard filtering through the corridors.
Kosovo is currently in the process of forming a new internationally backed court, which is expected to be based both in Pristina and The Hague.
The establishment of the so-called „specialist chambers“ comes after the EU’s Special Investigative Task Force last July published the findings of its three-year investigation into allegations initially made by Council of Europe rapporteur Dick Marty
09 Apr 09
KLA Ran Torture Camps in Albania
The Kosovo Liberation Army maintained a network of prisons in their bases in Albania and Kosovo during and after the conflict of 1999, eyewitnesses allege. Only now are the details of what occurred there emerging.
In a run-down industrial compound with shattered windows and peeling plaster in Kukes, Albania, chickens rummage for food and two trucks sit idle in a courtyard surrounded by rusted warehouses and a crumbling two-story supply building.
In the middle of the compound stands a cinderblock shack that was once the office of a mechanical plant that produced everything from manhole covers to elevator cages.
But, during the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia, from March to June 1999, this facility took on another purpose. It was occupied by a guerrilla force, the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, as a support base for their operations across the border in Serbian-ruled Kosovo.
But the factory was not merely the headquarters for guerrillas fighting the regime of Slobodan Milosevic to secure the independence of Kosovo from Serbia.
It assumed more sinister purposes: dozens of civilians, mainly Kosovo Albanians suspected of collaboration, but also Serbs and Roma were held captive there, beaten and tortured. Some were killed, their remains never recovered. The men who allegedly directed the abuses were officers of the KLA.
At least 25 people were imprisoned in Kukes, witnesses say. Amongst them were three Kosovo Albanian women. In the camp at least 18 people were killed, while others were later rescued by NATO troops.
It appears that Kukes housed one of a number of secret detention centres in Albania and Kosovo, and that prisoners were transferred from one facility to another.
Even after the NATO interventions, a camp was maintained in Baballoq/Babaloc in Kosovo, holding around 30 Serb and Roma prisoners, whose current whereabouts are unknown. Other camps in Albania may have held Serbs kidnapped in Kosovo after the war, according to four sources.
The names of several alleged perpetrators have been known to UNMIK for some time. One of them is still holding a high position in the Kosovo judiciary, Balkan Insight understands.Bislim Zyrapi, an official of the Kosovo Interior Ministry, who was responsible for KLA operations in Kukes, told Balkan Insight that there were no people killed, either at the base or outside of it.
Two of the KLA’s former top leaders rejected the allegations in separate interviews with the BBC.
Kosovo’s Prime Minister, Hashim Thaci, who was then the political director of the KLA, and Agim Ceku, former Prime Minister and former chief of the KLA headquarters, told the BBC they were not aware of any KLA prisons where captives were abused or where civilians were held.
Thaci said he was aware that individuals had “abused KLA uniforms” after the war, but said the KLA had distanced itself from such acts. He added that such abuse was “minimal”. Ceku said that the KLA fought a “clean war”.
However, Jose Pablo Baraybar, the chief of the Office of Missing Persons and Forensics within UNMIK for five years, says: “There were people that are certainly alive that were in Kukes, in that camp, as prisoners. Those people saw other people there, both Albanians and non-Albanians. There were members of the KLA leadership going through that camp. Many names were mentioned, and I would say that that is an established fact.”
Baraybar tracked missing citizens in Kosovo and across the border in Albania. 
Karin Limdal, spokeswoman for the EU rule of law mission in Kosovo, EULEX, told Balkan Insight that the mission is aware of the allegations concerning the Kukes case, and that prosecutors are looking at the evidence to see if they can bring indictments.
YELLOW MERCEDES OF DEATH
These grave allegations about the Kukes camp, in the north west of Albania, are based on interviews with several sources: two eyewitnesses – one former inmate and one member of the KLA, records from a cemetery in Albania and UN documents that we have gained access to, which detail the testimonies of people ill-treated in Kukes.
Together, they paint a portrait of a brutal prison regime that is at odds with the claims of former KLA leaders, who say they adhered to international human rights conventions and never detained civilians.
The abuses in Kukes may not have been isolated events. According to former KLA fighters who talked to us, as well as independent testimony provided to UN investigators, the KLA maintained a loose network of at least six secret jails in the dozen or so bases they operated in Albania and the two they had in Kosovo during and after the 1999 war.
Those jails were used for interrogations that routinely included torture, according to sources interviewed for this story.
Most former KLA soldiers we interviewed are proud of their war with the Serbian forces, whose bloody actions forced the mass flight of hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians from their homes in 1999.
But some said they felt shamed by what some KLA commanders and leaders had done under the cover of war.
“It didn’t seem strange at the time,” one former KLA soldier, who witnessed the events, said. “But now, looking back, I know that some of the things that were done to innocent civilians were wrong. But the people who did those things act as if nothing happened, and continue to hurt their own people, Albanians.”
Another eyewitness, a Kosovo Albanian, says he was held at the KLA base in Kukes on the pretext of being a Serbian spy, an allegation he vehemently denies.