Dick Marty during his speech at the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, October 2011. Photo: EPA/CHRISTOPHE KARABA
Dick Marty, who authored an explosive 2010 report on the alleged crimes of Kosovo Albanian guerrillas, says Swiss intelligence agencies believe he is the target of an assassination plot hatched in Serbia.
Serbia’s chief intelligence service said on Monday it had written to its Swiss counterpart to complain about remarks made by former Council of Europe rapporteur Dick Marty saying he had been provided with police protection due to death threats from “certain circles of the Serbian intelligence services.”
Public broadcaster Radio Television Suisse, RTS, carried an interview at the weekend with Marty, author of a 2010 report for the Council of Europe linking former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci to war crimes, including the harvesting of organs from detainees, around the time of the 1998-99 war in Kosovo.
Marty said he had been under police protection since December 2020.
“The threat seems to come from certain circles of the Serbian secret services who have asked the underworld, professional assassins, to eliminate me simply in order to put the blame on the Kosovars,” Marty said.
In response, Serbia’s Security Information Agency, BIA, said it had sent a letter to the Swiss Federal Intelligence Service in which it “strongly condemns and denies the malicious claims about the involvement of Serbian security services in planning anyone’s murder.”
“Such claims unjustly inflict incalculable damage to Serbia and the reputation of BIA and its members, who are dedicated and professional in performing their working tasks exclusively in accordance with the law,” BIA said in a statement carried by the Tanjug news agency.
According to the Swiss television piece, Federal Police in Switzerland issued an alert about death threats against Marty based on information obtained by Swiss intelligence agencies. It quoted a document which it said was from the Confederate State Ministry, MPC, saying that Marty “is to be killed on the orders of the Serbian secret services.”
“The assassination of Dick Marty was reportedly assigned to Serbian men who had been on such missions for the Serbian secret services for a long time and were trained by them as ‘absolute professionals’ who would handle the assassination ‘leaving no trace’,” the document said, adding that “a Serb reportedly smuggled weapons into Switzerland sometime in December 2020.”
It said the plan was to tie the assassination to the Kosovo government.
Thaci is in pre-trial detention in The Hague, where he faces charges of crimes against humanity and other war crimes during and after the war in Kosovo.
Source: Balkan insight
