"Sali Berisha was one of the main arms traffickers during the Kosovo conflict. His name is mentioned by four witnesses in documents from the (Serbian) war crimes prosecutor," Politika, a pro-government daily, said on its frontpage. During Milosevic regime

In Tirana, Berisha dismissed the claims as "racist slander."

"Claims by Politika, a mouthpiece of Serb ultranationalists and the advocate of the Serb genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo ,are nothing but racist slander," Berisha told AFP.

He linked Politika's report to an "anti-Albanian hysteria, led by (Council of Europe special rapporteur) Dick Marty, a racist who, without any proof, is trying to do everything to soil the Albanians' war in Kosovo."

"The way these accusations are presented, they can be only to my honour," Berisha said.

Politika says the file, number 33-08, of the war crimes prosecutor, quoted witnesses who identify a house belonging to Berisha in northern Albania close to the town of Tropoje, near the border with Kosovo, as "an arms buying centre".

The witnesses, not identified by name, are members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, (KLA), the ethnic Albanian guerrilla force that fought the Serbian forces of then strongman Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo.

The men were arrested by Serb security forces during the 1998-99 war and questioned about how the KLA got its arms, according to the daily.

The accusations against Berisha come a few weeks after the release of Marty's report implicating Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in organ trafficking.

It says the Kosovar leader headed a Kosovo Liberation Army faction which controlled secret detention centres in Albania where trafficking in human organs taken from mostly Serb prisoners was alleged to have taken place in the aftermath of the 1998-99 war.

Berisha said that Marty, as well as Politika, had already "launched tough attacks against the NATO intervention in Kosovo and its independence," proclaimed in 2008, nine years after the Alliance bombing campaign against Milosevic's forces crackdown on KLA guerrillas.

"The slurs that Belgrade's Politika and Dick Marty are propagating again... prove their blind racism and their big disappointment with the liberation of one nation," Berisha said.

However, he insisted that Albania "will be open to any investigation linked to the war in Kosovo and other cases" probed by European Union rule of law mission in Kosovo (EULEX) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

Marty's report also said that Thaci operated "with the support and complicity not only of Albania's former governance structures, including the Socialist government in power at the time, but also from Albania's secret service and the formidable Albanian mafia".

At the time of the conflict in Kosovo, Berisha was the leader of the biggest opposition party in Albania after stepping down as president of the country in 1997. He eventually returned to power in 2005 becoming prime minister.

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