Prosecutors in contact over organ trade doctor

Prosecutors in contact over organ trade doctor

PRIŠTINA -- The Serbian Prosecutor's Office for War Crimes is in contact with Kosovo's Special Prosecution Office concerning Yusuf Sonmez, EULEX has said.

The Turkish doctor is suspected of having conducted illegal human organ transplantations.

The EU mission "can confirm that the Serbian Prosecutor's Office for War Crimes is in contact with the Special Prosecution Office in connection with a Kosovo fugitive from justice who has been allegedly located in a European metropolis," spokesman Miguel Carvalho de Faria told Tanjug late on Wednesday.

The Prosecutor's Office for War Crimes has submitted to EULEX Chief Prosecutor Jonathan Ratel all available information on Sonmez after locating him in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, last week through protected witnesses.

Sonmez, who is sought by Interpol, is the first accused in the Medicus case, and has been tried in absentia in a Priština court, the Prosecutor's Office for War Crimes said on Tuesday.

Sonmez was arrested in Istanbul in early January 2011, but was released following questioning on the grounds of having a registered residence.

The Medicus clinic, which was shut down in 2008, is mentioned in a Council of Europe report implicating members of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in trade of organs taken from prisoners during the 1999 conflict in Kosovo.

The findings of the Prosecutor's Office for War Crimes indicate that Sonmez took part in transplantations of the organs harvested from kidnapped Serbs, Roma and disloyal ethnic Albanians in a location in northern Albania that is known as "the Yellow House."