Kosovo's wartime intelligence chief and outgoing parliamentary speaker Kadri Veseli said Thursday he had been summoned by a Hague-based court dealing with alleged war crimes committed by Kosovo guerrillas during a 1990s conflict.
The special war crime court established in 2015 and operating under Kosovo law sits in The Hague to protect witnesses and is staffed with international judges and prosecutors funded by the European Union.
"As one of the leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) I received today summons from the Specialist Chambers to be questioned at The Hague on December 4," Veseli told reporters.
He did not clarify in which capacity he was summoned.
The tribunal was created following an international probe after a Council of Europe report tied top former Kosovo guerrilla leaders, including now President Hashim Thaci, to atrocities committed against non-Albanian civilians during the war.
Veseli, the wartime head of the KLA's intelligence, served as a parliamentary speaker during the previous legislature and chairs the Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK), founded by Thaci, that lost the October 6 election.
The Council of Europe report noted the disappearance of almost 500 people, including about 400 Serbs, after late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic's forces withdrew from Kosovo in June 1999, when the KLA had "virtually exclusive control on the ground".
The report unveiled reports of abductions, summary executions and -- most controversially -- the trafficking of prisoners' organs, with special rapporteur Dick Marty accusing the KLA of abusing, torturing and killing prisoners, mostly ethnic Serbs and Roma.
The tribunal did not comment on Veseli's summons but the KLA's war veterans' organisation said earlier that more than 100 ethnic Albanian fighters had been called for questioning so far, including several other high-profile politicians.
Kosovo's outgoing Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj resigned in July after being summoned by the prosecutor for interrogation as a suspect.
However, no indictments have been made public yet.
The 1998-1999 war pitted ethnic Albanian guerrillas seeking independence for the southern Serbian province of Kosovo against Serbia's forces, who withdrew from the territory after an 11-week NATO bombing campaign.