Doctor Philip Njemanze and Rochas Okorocha human organs trafficking saga on HWN HIGHLIGHT

Serbia's war crimes prosecution has asked Nigeria to quizz a senior doctor who has accused a state governor and Kosovo’s foreign minister Hashim Thaci of trafficking in human organs.

Serbia’s Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor on Thursday said it had asked Nigeria to interrogate Philip Njemanze - a doctor who claimed that Kosovo politician Hashim Thaci and Nigerian politician Rochas Okorocha were involved in trading in the organs of Serbs who went missing during and after the war in Kosovo in 1999.

The prosecution has... started the procedure that would enable the interrogation of a person who might have knowledge about the human organ trafficking in Kosovo and in the north of Albania," the prosecution said in a statement.

The request comes after Njemanze, chairman of the Nigerian Medical Association, NMA, on February 4 accused Okorocha, who is governor of Nigeria’s Imo State province, of trafficking in human organs with collaborators in Kosovo, Turkey, Croatia and other countries.

For the first time in human history, a government has declared itself an organ trafficking cartel. The Imo state government is using state health facilities to facilitate an organ trafficking network," Njemanze said in Owerri, the capital of Imo State, media reports said.

Foreign collaborators of the state government from Turkey, Kosovo, Croatia and others are already here in Imo to perfect the creation of the network. It is an international network with Okorocha as as its local head," he added.

A former prime minister of Kosovo is the head of the organ trafficking in Europe and he is a friend of Okorocha,” he continued.

Njemanze further alleged that on recent trips to Turkey, Kosovo, Croatia and other Latin American and Asian countries, the governor had consummated the organ trade in the state.

Serbia’s war crimes prosecution also said it had so far heard 160 witnesses, and added that it was cooperating with the EU's rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, EULEX, which has heard more than 200 witnesses in Serbia.

Allegations of organ trafficking and organ harvesting first appeared in a memo written in 1999 by the American journalist Michael Montgomery, who investigated alleged organ-trafficking by Kosovo guerrilla fighters after the war.

It was then sent to UN Mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, which was the administrative authority in Kosovo after the war ended.

A report published in 2011 by the Council of Europe's rapporteur, Dick Marty, then said there was mounting evidence that groups including senior leaders of the former Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, had been part of an organ-harvesting and trafficking network operating from a villa in the town of Fushe Kruje, in Albania.

After the report, the EU set up a task force that conducted a three-year investigation into the allegations and a released its own report.

This said there was evidence to prosecute unnamed senior KLA officials for crimes against humanity including abductions and murders committed after the 1999 conflict.

These findings provided the basis for prosecutions at the new war crimes court, to try senior KLA fighters for war crimes and post-war offences, will be set up in The Hague this year.

Organ trafficking is not directly mentioned in the legislation passed by the Kosovo parliament authorising the new court to function.

However, it does say that people can be prosecuted for “subjecting persons who are in the power of an adverse party to physical mutilation or to medical or scientific experiments of any kind which are neither justified by medical, dental or hospital treatment”.

So far, a Kosovo court has convicted five men of participating in an illegal organ-trading ring that harvested and sold human kidneys at the Medicus clinic near Pristina.

Most recently, another organ-trafficking suspect, a Turkish doctor Kenan Demirkol, surrendered in Pristina on January 25 to give a statement to prosecutors.

In exchange, Demirkol asked for the removal of the Interpol warrant arrest that came into force in 2014. He is charged with organ-trafficking, together with another Turkish doctor, Yusuf Sonmez, who remains at large.