[Kcc-News] Bodies of 3 Americans found in mass grave in Serbia; Serbian investigators open second mass grave on edge of Belgrade

[Mentor Cana]

1. Bodies of 3 New Yorkers Believed Found in Serbian Grave
2. Serbian investigators open second mass grave on edge of Belgrade

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http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/16/international/europe/16ALBA.html
July 16, 2001

Bodies of 3 New Yorkers Believed Found in Serbian Grave
By CARLOTTA GALL

ELGRADE, Serbia, July 15 The Serbian authorities have found what may be the
remains of three Albanian-American brothers from New York who were arrested
and apparently executed under Slobodan Milosevic's government shortly after
NATO's war against Yugoslavia ended.

They would be the first Albanian- American dead found in Serbia since the
war ended in 1999. They were among several hundred from the United States
who formed what they had called the Atlantic Brigade to help in the fight
against Serbian forces in Kosovo.

But at the time that the brothers disappeared, the war was over. And
according to accounts provided by witnesses and investigators familiar with
the case, the three men were apparently not engaged in combat, but were
escorting frightened neighbors out of the Serbian province.

The three bodies, blindfolded and their hands bound by wire, were found
last week lying at the top of a mass grave holding as many as 16 bodies at
Petrovo Selo, in eastern Serbia. Documents apparently found on them
indicated that they were three brothers of the Bytyqi family of New York:
Ylli, 24; Agron, 23; and Mehmet, 21.

They were last seen alive on July 8, 1999, when they were released from a
prison in southern Serbia, then driven away in a white car by the Serbian
special police.

While officials in Belgrade would not confirm the identities of the bodies,
a lawyer who is acting as a spokesman for the family, Martin G. Vulaj, said
in New York that the family had received a call last week from an American
official in Macedonia who said there was a "very high probability" that the
bodies were those of the three brothers.

"They had identification documents on them apparently when they were
found." he said. "The information is that two of them were in civilian
clothes, and one of them, at least partially, had on fatigues. We don't
know which one."

"The language they used," he added, referring to the American official,
"was that they were 99 percent certain it was them."

Natasa Kandic, head of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, who has
investigated the case, says their membership in the Atlantic Brigade was
not the reason for their arrest by the Serbian police.

The young men had been staying with their mother in the town of Prizren, in
southern Kosovo, after the war ended and NATO troops had moved into the
province, she said.

The Bytyqis agreed to help their mother's neighbors, three Roma, or Gypsy
men, who wanted to leave for Serbia. Fearful of the revenge attacks by
Albanians that were widespread at the time, the three Roma asked the Bytyqi
brothers to accompany them on the two-hour drive to the border with Serbia
proper. One of the Roma, Miroslav Mitrovic, later reported the incident to
Ms. Kandic in her office in Belgrade.

He said the men set off from home on June 26 and drove north via the Kosovo
capital, Pristina, where they were stopped by members of the Albanian rebel
force, the Kosovo Liberation Army. The rebels accused them of helping the
Roma men to escape, but allowed the Bytyqis to proceed.

Once over the boundary into Serbia, at Merdare, they were stopped by the
police and arrested for entering Serbia proper without visas.

They were sentenced before a judge to 15 days' imprisonment and moved to
the jail in the nearby town of Prokuplje. On July 8, four days before their
sentence was up, they were released into the hands of two plainclothes
policemen who drove them away.

According to Ms. Kandic, one policeman who had been preparing to take them
back to Kosovo was ordered off the case by his chief and told that others
would deal with them. The implication was that the chief had received
orders from the authorities in Belgrade, she said.

She said she did not know who had ordered the killings or why. "They were
registered by the court and the prison, and afterwards they were taken away
and killed," she said. "Why?"

After the exhumation, Ms. Kandic's organization, which investigates war
crimes in the Balkans, sent an open letter to the Serbian authorities
demanding that they provide an answer to the Bytyqis' mother. Observers
from the center were present at the exhumation.

The grave found at Petrovo Selo is on the grounds of a former training camp
of the Special Operations Units of the Secret Police, the most feared of
the Serbian forces operating in Kosovo.

Investigators have found 75 bodies in two graves so far, and say that apart
from the three Americans, the rest are Kosovo Albanians who were
transported from Kosovo during the war with NATO in an operation ordered by
Mr. Milosevic to remove evidence of war crimes from the province.

Another mass grave containing 36 bodies has been discovered at Batajnica, a
suburb of Belgrade, in a training base belonging to the Interior Ministry's
Special Antiterrorist Unit.

Today the Serbian authorities announced that they had found yet another
mass grave, the fourth in the last two months, holding some 50 to 60 bodies
in western Serbia. These bodies are also believed to hold victims of the
Kosovo war.


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http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010716/1/19cib.html
Tuesday July 17, 12:59 AM

Serbian investigators open second mass grave on edge of Belgrade

BELGRADE, July 16 (AFP) -
Serbian investigators have started work on a second mass grave on the
grounds of a special police base that is thought to contain a large number
of murdered Kosovo Albanians, the state news agency Tanjug said Monday.

The grave is at Batajnica, some 15 kilometres (10 miles) northwest of the
capital, where investigators exhumed around 36 corpses earlier this month,
Tanjug quoted a Belgrade district court statement as saying.

It said the second grave contained "a large number of corpses" but gave no
further details.

Serbian police confirmed Sunday they had found yet another mass grave
thought to contain the corpses of more than 60 Kosovo Albanians presumed to
have been killed by Serbian forces, put in a truck and dumped in a
reservoir in 1999.

A statement on the Serbian government Internet site said the bodies had
been buried in southwest Serbia on the border with Bosnia by the former
regime after corpses were spotted floating to the surface.

"More than 60 bodies were found in the Perucac hydroelectric plant
reservoir," the statement said.

The Perucac discovery bore the hallmarks of a similar attempt to hide
bodies in another refrigerated truck recovered from the bed of the river
Danube.

The truck contained the bodies of more than 70 elderly people, women and
children, thought to have been from the Prizren region in the south of
Kosovo. The bodies showed signs of bullet wounds and mutilation.

Thousands of ethnic Albanians went missing during the 1998-99 Kosovo
conflict, and the West accused Milosevic's forces of committing widespread
atrocities.

Milosevic is now awaiting trial before the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague for his alleged part in war
crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the province.

The head of the organised crime unit, Dragan Karleusa, has openly accused
Milosevic and his supporters of ordering the destruction of criminal
evidence of crimes committed by Serbian forces against the ethnic Albanian
civilian population.

He said that some 800 ethnic Albanians are thought to have been buried in
mass graves around Belgrade, including the Batajnica site.

Some 2,500 ethnic Albanians and 1,300 Serbs are still listed as missing,
two years after the end of the conflict.