Jiri Benes, head of the Czech Republic’s foreign ministry’s press department, said in Prague that three Czech students, reported missing on the Albanian-Kosovo border in 2001, have not been heard of since.

The Czech Republic is seriously concerned, he said, that they might have become the victims of the Albanian fighters’ alleged practice of abducting foreigners, killing them and removing their organs for secret sale on the Western organ black market.

Vladimir Vukcevic, Serbia’s top war crimes prosecutor, claimed in an interview with the Serbian daily Blic last week that scores of Kosovar Serbs, several Russians and three Czechs had been the victims of this trade used to finance the fight against the Serb state during President Milosevic’s murderous rule.

Carla Del Ponte, former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague and “the hammer of Serbia’s Milosevic regime”, first brought into the open the KLA’s alleged trafficking in the organs of abducted Serbs in her memoirs published last year.

The Kosovo authorities said they have no knowledge of the fate of the missing Czechs, but their wording did not specifically rebut the KLA’s alleged secret organ trade. Veton Elshani, the Kosovo police’s chief foreign liaison officer, told news agency CTK: “We have no information about Czech citizens being among the victims of the organ trafficking…The Kosovo police are investigating the case [of the three Czechs].”

He added that no concrete proof has been furnished to prove that the KLA had harvested the organs of its prisoners. The only case involving organ sale involved a Turk who, he claimed, had “willingly sold his kidney to an Israeli buyer”.

But the issue of the illegal excising of organs from the prisoners of the Kosovo Liberation Army continues to exercise Slav neighbours and the European Union, despite the Pristina authorities’ denials.

Last August, the Council of Europe began investigating the allegations of secret trafficking in human organs taken from Serbs prisoners by Albanian fighters during the decade of the Kosovo war. The EU move was in response to Serbia’s request.

After nearly a decade of wholesale repression and genocidal war waged by Serbian forces on the Albanian majority of the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, NATO forces intervened in March 1999 with a devastating air assault on Yugoslavia. It ended the Serb massacres and expulsion of ethnic Albanians, prised Kosovo from the hands of marauding Serb forces and fatally undermined President Milosevic’s bloody rule in Belgrade.

The tales of abducted Serbs’ fate in KLA hands, reported by journalists during the fighting, were gruesome. According to Del Ponte’s book, The Hague received information from many credible journalists that in the summer of 1999 Kosovo Albanians smuggled up to 300 Serbs abducted in Kosovo into northern Albania, where they were held in secret KLA facilities.

Young and fit prisoners were well fed, regularly checked out by doctors and, after their condition improved sufficiently, they were moved to special locations, “including a shack behind a yellow house south of the [Albanian]town of Burrel”.

The investigative journalists, described as trustworthy but unnamed by Del Ponte, were quoted as allegedly saying that “a room in the house was turned into a makeshift clinic where doctors removed the captives’ organs.

The organs were then smuggled out of the country via Rinas airport, near Tirana, then sold on the world organ black market.” The prisoners were then killed.

Del Ponte had repeatedly complained while still in office that United Nations officials in Kosovo prevented her from investigating the Kosovo fighters’ alleged secret organ harvesting and sales to well-heeled Western buyers.

Belgrade claims that up to 500 Serbs captured by Albanian fighters have disappeared without a trace during the Kosovo war. Scores of Russian volunteers captured during the fighting are also missing, as are the three Czech students.

The Czechs, though reportedly not involved in the fighting, might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and, as they were Slavs and thus deemed to be enemies of the Muslim Albanians, their fate in KLA hands would have been sealed.

The Serbian authorities seized on the Czechs’ demand for explanations, and Del Ponte’s detailed allegations, to have the Albanian freedom fighters’ alleged organ harvesting from their prisoners investigated in conformity with the provisions of the Geneva Convention.