there were hundreds of people who had
disappeared after the war whose bodies
had not been recovered that was a fact
and it's actually still a fact today I
think today the Kosovo war is kind of
forgotten so much has happened since
then 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan this was the biggest Western
military engagement in Europe since
second world war the time it was a big
deal we went into Kosovo right after the
war Stephen Smith my colleague and
myself and we wanted to focus on one
village that had been the scene of a
terrible massacre by Serbian
paramilitaries we did a whole
documentary kind of anatomy of a war
crime but what we found along the way
and this is just a month after the war
was that the crimes hadn't stopped what
we were finding after the war after the
Serbian military had been driven out by
NATO and the ethnic Albanians had
returned to Kosovo
there was an underbelly there were
crimes that were committed not by the
Serbs but by ethnic Albanian guerrillas
at the time these crimes were seen as
crimes of vengeance these were Serbs and
other minorities disappearing and the
allegation was that they were
disappearing at the hands of the Kosovo
Liberation Army this is the ethnic
albanian guerilla group that had taken
up arms to get independence from Serbia
what we found is that people were
disappearing but many of the people were
alive they were being kidnapped and we
had assumed that kidnapping usually
involves some kind of ransom so we
assumed the gangsters were moving in and
kidnapping people and holding them so
they would be exchanged for money or for
Albanian prisoners who were being held
in Serbian jails but that wasn't
happening there weren't any ransoms
people were just vanishing without a
trace we started hearing stories about
Serbs and other minorities who had been
kidnapped that they'd actually been
captured put in trucks and driven across
the board
to Albania people were being taken alive
across the border well why if this was a
crime of vengeance why would you bother
keeping someone alive and taking them
across the border at some risk and at
some cost and that's where the story
really started getting strange the
soldiers were given special orders not
to mistreat them not to abuse them and
when they got to the other side of the
border to these houses or these
makeshift detention facilities there
were doctors present they were told that
the doctors were there to do medical
checks then the story that some of these
men started saying was that these
captives some of them were being
selected moved to other locations and
ultimately killed and they are organs
namely their kidneys were extracted it
shipped out of the country for illicit
organ transplants and we know at the
time there was a thriving industry in
Istanbul Turkey for illicit organ
transplants people coming from Israel
from the Middle East than paying
hundreds of thousands of dollars for
these kidneys it seemed like absolute
science fiction
we honed in on one man he was a young
ethnic Albanian who had joined the
Kosovo Liberation Army for the reason of
getting independence from Serbia and he
ended up driving what he said were two
ethnic Serbs from one sort of safehouse
to another in Albania they somehow had
gotten wind of what was going on in
terms of people being killed for their
organs and they pleaded with him to
shoot them so they wouldn't be cut up
for body parts he was disgusted by that
and this man never asked anything from
us no money no women but still even if
we believed in him you need details we
were able to isolate one location this
is a house in central Albania where we
believed some of these captives were
taken that became known as the Yellow
House we got the location and one day I
made the trip there I went with an
Albanian driver and a translator
and luck would have it that our car
broke down about a mile from the village
so we decided to walk into the village
and keeping in mind that this is a place
where supposedly some really really bad
things went down very remote they don't
see foreigners very often so we walked
down a muddy road through these homes
pretty poor area and we saw the house
kind of sitting on its own across this
field and there was a tiny little shop
nearby that sold soft drinks and so we
stopped there but then we were
surrounded by villagers and people were
asking questions and I realized that I
didn't feel comfortable telling these
people that I was a journalist of what I
was there for I mean I didn't feel safe
the road ends at that house and it
doesn't go further into the mountains
and so I concocted a ridiculous story
that I was a highway engineer looking at
the possibility of whether the road that
ended there could be continued through a
narrow mountain pass to connect with
another town that was my cover story and
it must have seemed absurd to the
villagers but I wasn't about to tell
them that I was there looking for an
organ harvesting operation and asking
them were there any Serb civilians
buried nearby whatever the villagers
believed I don't know but it was enough
to get us out of there
we knew that the only way to prove than
any of this happen was to find the
bodies of the victims and try to
determine how they were killed and
whether they went through some kind of
surgical procedures before or after
their death we were not in any position
to go dig for bodies in Albania we did
not have the resources and frankly we
didn't have any kind of legal position
to be digging up Graves in Albania so we
went to the UN on the humanitarian side
thinking that this is information that
could be helpful to them and hoping that
it might make a breakthrough in the
investigation the UN got interested they
recognized that there were hundreds of
people who had disappeared after the war
whose bodies had not been recovered that
was a fact and it's actually still a
fact today they assembled a group of
experts and they went to the house and I
went along as did my colleague Stephen
Smith when we arrived at this house with
local Albanian police with all these um
people with hazmat suits the family that
was living in the house was there a few
other villagers had arrived it was a
very strange scene the team looked right
to work and within a few hours they
found a few curious things they found
some IV drip bags that had been out in
the dirt outside the house they found
injectable drugs that weren't in garbage
they determined that some of those drugs
could be used as muscle relaxants during
surgical operations and then perhaps the
strangest thing was at night we went
back to the house and the team decided
to test some of the surfaces the floors
in the house and they used a substance
called luminol which illuminates areas
where there may have been blood so this
team started spraying in what was the
living room and to our amazement a lot
of the floor lit up there were
indications that there had been
considerable blood on that floor but
there was one place and it was the
middle of the floor and there was a kind
of a rectangular spot where there
weren't any indications of blood was it
an operating table we didn't know
just as strange when the team leader
started asking the family members why
there may have been blood on this floor
they came up with different answers at
one point one of the men lived at the
house that his wife had given birth in
the room and that I guess in his mind
explained why there would be evidence of
huge amounts of blood on the floor
unfortunately his wife contradicted that
the next day and then the man said well
we slaughter animals in that room as
part of a Muslim holiday which seemed
really weird that you would slaughter
animals in your living room
there was no conclusive proof of
anything there was enticing evidence but
we didn't know as we were driving away
coming back on this dirt road a group of
villagers of men came down to the road
and blocked our way out they said very
clearly nothing happened here no one was
brought here and essentially it's time
to leave now I think the message was we
don't want to see you back here the
evidence was boxed up it went back to
Kosovo and it was eventually shipped to
the war crimes tribunal in The Hague
what we found out many years later is
that the UN The Hague did nothing with
that evidence they didn't have it
analyzed when prosecutors determined
that this case in Albania of the Yellow
House did not relate to any of their
current cases they destroyed the
evidence we had hit a brick wall you
know we could not publish this story
with the evidence we had
and then here's what happened the former
UN prosecutor in The Hague a woman named
Carla del Ponte published her memoirs
and in her memoir she included
information we had developed and given
to the UN and Kosovo the allegations of
the organ trafficking the allegations
that the Kosovo Liberation Army was
involved she put it in her book our
information in her book and the story
exploded in the Balkans I went back to
Kosovo the time and we were able to nail
down the fact that there were secret
detention facilities in Albania that the
Kosovo Liberation Army was running that
led to convictions of former KLA leaders
but it did not nail down the organ
trafficking allegations the problem was
I was in Kosovo trying to find my old
sources no one wanted to talk about this
because it becomes such a political
issue anyone who dared suggest that
Kosovo Liberation Army were involved in
this kind of organ trafficking they were
risking their own death even if
something happens I can't prove it and
there's no one else who's going to step
in and do that turns out there were
people who wanted to get to the bottom
of it
the Council of Europe responding to this
book appointed one of their top
investigators a Swiss senator named dick
Marty he had actually helped expose the
secret CIA black sites in Europe that
were used to detain and interrogate and
torture terrorist suspects what Marty
found was that there was indeed a
conspiracy among former Kosovo
Liberation Army operatives and officers
that went to the top including the prime
minister of kosovo a group of people who
were involved in drug trafficking and a
wide range of criminal activities and
that it included organ trafficking there
was the yellow house the house I visited
twice Marty concluded that indeed people
had been taken to the house people had
been raped villagers have participated
in this their silence have been paid for
with women or drugs and some people have
been killed at the house Marty found the
second house where people had been held
and then they had been taken
individually and x'q
gunshots the back of the head and then
their kidneys were extracted at a clinic
nearby those kidneys were then exported
for illegal organ transplant operations
it was very strange to see that this
picture that we had vaguely carved out
was coming into focus
was really amazing and in a way scary
because I think back to the village
that I had wandered into that that was a
place where horrible things happened and
that allegedly the villagers knew all
about it and some of them even
participated you know in retrospect I
would probably think twice about what I
did going into that village knowing what
I know now
you