On Wednesday, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) veterans said they had received from an unknown person more files containing documents from war crime investigations of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and Specialist Prosecutor’s Office.
The next day, officials from the KSC-SPO seized all these documents from offices of the Organization of War Veterans (OVL).
This is the second time the OVL has been provided with KSC-SPO files in the last two weeks. They claimed to have received over 4,000 files previously.
In both cases, OVL leaders said the documents showed close collaboration between the KSC-SPO and the Prosecution Office of Serbia to raise war crime charges against Albanians. They added that the leaking of files is a blow to the court.
The special court was established five years ago, in August 2015, by Kosovo’s parliament, to investigate alleged crimes by former KLA members.
It followed a 2011 Council of Europe report in which Swiss Senator Dick Marty addressed the alleged crimes of “members of the Kosovo Liberation Army against ethnic minorities and political rivals” from January 1998 until in December 2000.
The court is located in The Hague. It has filed no charges so far but dozens of people have been interviewed. Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and former Speaker of Parliament Kadri Veseli were indicted but charges against them have not been confirmed.
President Thaci recently asked the parliament to extend the KSC-SPO mandate, although legal provisions stipulate it’s the Council of the European Union that regulates its mandate.
