AP News, June 5th, 2007
Serbian authorities on Tuesday began excavating what appeared to be a mass grave containing the bodies of more than 350 Kosovo Albanians.
The site, in an abandoned quarry on a border zone between Serbia and Kosovo filled with shattered vehicles and a swamp covered with rocks, would be the third mass grave containing victims of Slobodan Milosevic's war against Kosovo Albanians in 1998-99.
Bruno Vekaric, the spokesman for Serbia's war crimes prosecutors, said witnesses reported seeing four trucks unload bodies in the area of Raska, near the border with Kosovo in 1999 during a Serbian crackdown.
"We have serious indications that more than 350 bodies might have been buried there," Vekaric said. Authorities said they first heard about the grave a few months ago.
Since 2000, about 800 bodies have been discovered in two mass graves in Serbia in what appeared to be the former regime's attempt to cover up its atrocities during the Kosovo war.
Meanwhile, the chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor for former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, was in Belgrade pressing Serbian officials to do more to capture the remaining five key war crimes fugitives, most notably wartime Bosnian Serb military commander Gen. Ratko Mladic.
Vekaric said Del Ponte met Tuesday with her Serbian counterpart and Serbian security officials tasked with capturing the fugitives.
Vekaric said one of the fugitives, a police general wanted in connection with Kosovo atrocities, Vlastimir Djordjevic, is in Russia, and that former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, the No. 2 on the most wanted list, is not in Serbia.
He gave no details about Mladic and the two other fugitives who remain at large and who are believed hiding in Serbia. Mladic and Karadzic have been charged by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, with genocide in the slaughter of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995 _ the worst single atrocity in Europe since World War II.
The United States said Monday it expects a vote this week on a Western-backed resolution that would give Kosovo independence under international supervision, but other Security Council members were less certain. Russia, Serbia's traditional ally, hinted it would veto such a proposal.
The European Union last year suspended pre-membership talks with Serbia after Belgrade failed to meet two deadlines for the extradition of Mladic to The Hague.
