PRISTINA (AFP) – Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci yesterday condemned as malicious reports that separatist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) rebels abused civilians in a network of prisons in Albania and Kosovo a decade ago. “The values of the KLA are the values of all Albanians,” said Thaci.

Reports to the contrary were “malicious attacks at the time of extraordinary and historic progress by Albanians.”

Thaci, the former chief of the KLA’s political wing, told reporters: “Now Albania is in NATO; NATO is in Kosovo. Naturally, not everyone is happy about this progress because Albanians have become a stabilizing factor in the region.”

Last week, media organizations including the BBC reported that the KLA had abducted civilians in Kosovo, torturing and killing some of them in 1999 after NATO intervened to end a Serbian crackdown on the rebels.

According to the reports, which quoted anonymous witnesses, the victims included Kosovo Serbs, Roma and ethnic Albanians, who had been held by the KLA in several illegal prison camps in neighboring Albania. The allegations of abuse – notably that the KLA trafficked Serb prisoners to Albania from Kosovo to harvest their body organs – were raised first in 2008 by former UN chief war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte.

Del Ponte claimed in her book “The Hunt: Me and War Criminals” that some 300 prisoners had been kidnapped and transported from Kosovo to Albania, where their organs were removed for sale to foreign clinics before they were killed.

Jakup Krasniqi, Kosovo’s parliamentary speaker who was the KLA spokesman at the time, said of the allegations that they had been launched by those opposed to Kosovo’s independence. “This serves as propaganda, which during and before the war had been directed against all those forces that fought for the independence of Kosovo,” he said.