More than 900 bodies of Kosovo war victims exhumed in Serbia

  

Source: Agence France-Presse (AFP)
Date: 10 Feb 2003


BELGRADE, Feb 10 (AFP) - More than 900 bodies of presumed Kosovo war victims have been unearthed from three mass graves in Serbia since June 2001, Nebojsa Covic, a key Serbian official in charge of Kosovo affairs said Monday.

Covic, who is also Serbia's deputy prime minister, said the bodies were believed to be ethnic Albanians killed during the 1999 conflict in Kosovo and brought to Serbia, Tanjug news agency reported.

Under the supervision of international forensic experts, some 807 bodies were exhumed from a site in Batajnica, near Belgrade, 81 from a site near the eastern city of Novo Selo and 48 from the western area around Bajina Basta, Covic said.

Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic is currently on trial before the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, in connection with the 1999 war in Kosovo. Three of his allies are also to be tried for alleged war crimes committed in the province.

The crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo by the Milosevic regime was ended by an 11-week NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia beginning in June 1999. The province was then placed under UN administration.

Covic also said that Serb officials have collected information on some 1,944 Serbs and non-Albanians, believed to have been kidnapped since the end of the war in Kosovo by ethnic Albanian guerrillas.

"For 950 of them, we have complete files," Covic said, insisting that the UN judicial officials in Kosovo have failed to launch proceedings against any former rebel so far.

More than 200,000 Serbs fled Kosovo in 1999 for other parts of Serbia or neighbouring Montenegro, fearing revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians after Belgrade's troops pulled out.

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