[ALBSA-Info] Yugoslav Army Reveals War Details

[Gazhebo at aol.com]

Yugoslav Army Reveals War Details

  
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) - The Yugoslav army released grisly details Monday 
from its own investigations of soldiers it said tortured, raped and killed 
ethnic Albanians during the 1999 Kosovo war, the state-run Tanjug news agency 
reported. 

A statement by military prosecutor Col. Stanimir Radosavljevic said the army 
has handed over nine cases of major atrocities to the country's civilian 
courts because the suspects were demobilized after the conflict. 

Radosavljevic said the nine suspects ``committed crimes against civilian 
populations'' during the last and deadliest stage of the Kosovo war, when 
NATO intervened militarily against the government troops battling separatist 
Kosovo Albanians. 

Stevan Jekic, a suspect from the southern Serbian town of Raska, allegedly 
captured an unidentified ethnic Albanian civilian in Kosovo and used him as a 
target while adjusting the sight on his rifle, fatally shooting the man, the 
report said. 

Four other soldiers allegedly took eight unidentified civilians from their 
homes in April 1999 in northern Kosovo, lined them against the wall and mowed 
them down with gunfire. The bodies were then thrown into a well and some 
allegedly doused with gasoline and set on fire. 

Tomislav Milenkovic, a volunteer who joined the troops when the Kosovo 
conflict escalated, took a young woman out of a refugee convoy in Kosovo and 
``raped her several times in a military camp,'' Radosavljevic said. The woman 
later escaped. 

Three other former servicemen are under investigation for killing civilians 
during the war. Hostilities erupted when former Yugoslav President Slobodan 
Milosevic sent government troops into action against ethnic Albanian 
guerrillas fighting for independence for the province in southern Serbia. 

Milosevic is awaiting trial by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, 
Netherlands, which indicted him for crimes against humanity in Kosovo. 

Radosavljevic said many of the army's investigations began during Milosevic's 
rule, but as the military's own classified proceedings.