Serbia jails four for 1999 killings

SERBIA HAS jailed four former policemen for between 13 and 20 years for the murder of 50 Kosovo Albanians in 1999.

The dead included 14 children, a pregnant woman and a 100-year-old woman, who were found buried in a mass grave along with hundreds of other civilian victims of the 1998-1999 war between Belgrade’s forces and Kosovo’s separatist rebels.

Radojko Repanovic and Sladjan Cukaric were sentenced to 20 years in prison yesterday, while Miroslav Petkovic and Milorad Nisavic were sentenced to 15 and 13 years respectively. Three other men were found not guilty.

Serbia’s war crimes court heard how the defendants rounded up members of one extended Kosovo Albanian family in their village of Suva Reka in March 1999, killing several men with machine-gun fire before forcing the rest into a pizza restaurant and throwing hand grenades at them.

Those showing signs of life were shot in the head and transported to a mass grave in Kosovo, where they were initially dumped. One woman survived by playing dead and jumping from a truck packed with corpses. The bodies were transferred to Serbia and buried in mass graves in the east and at a police training ground near Belgrade.

The three-year trial has received intense coverage in Serbia, where many of those who fought in the Balkan wars of the early 1990s and in the Kosovo campaign are still revered as heroes.

After nine years under UN control, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia last year, but Belgrade refuses to recognise its sovereignty and regularly denounces the Nato bombing campaign that drove Serb troops out of Kosovo in 1999.

Amnesty International yesterday demanded that Nato be held accountable for the deaths of 16 civilians in the bombing of Serbia’s state radio and television(RTS) building on April 23rd, 1999. “The bombing . . . was a deliberate attack on a civilian object and as such constitutes a war crime,” said Sian Jones, Amnesty’s Balkans expert.