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Milosevic Denies War Crimes Coverup July 23, 2002 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 3:12 p.m. ET THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- Working at night, Serb policemen removed the decomposing bodies of 86 people, including two children, from a white freezer truck that had floated to the surface of the Danube River. Most of the victims bore signs of being stabbed or bludgeoned to death. Some women wore the traditional dress of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. The policemen quietly loaded the corpses into a flatbed truck, which took them in the direction of central Serbia. The freezer truck was burned to a skeleton, then blown up with explosives. In dramatic testimony Tuesday, the U.N. war crimes tribunal heard the story of the freezer truck from two Serbian policemen. The incident could be crucial to the prosecution's case that Slobodan Milosevic orchestrated atrocities in Kosovo and then tried to cover them up. The former Yugoslav president contested the scenario described by the prosecution, arguing that the people who died in the truck were victims of human traffickers. He cited official reports that smuggling people to western Europe was rampant in that area. ``We are talking here about an organized criminal group. People had drowned when the lorry toppled and ended up in the river,'' he said, cross-examining the prosecution witnesses. Milosevic is facing 66 counts of war crimes, including genocide, in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He could be sentenced to life if convicted on any charge. On April 6, 1999, Serb policeman Bosko Radojkovic and a scuba diver were sent to investigate what looked like a large white box floating in the Danube in eastern Serbia near the Romanian border. Radojkovic, a crime scene technician, told the court that the box was a white Mercedes freezer truck with Kosovo license plates, and markings of the Export Slaughterhouse from the provincial capital, Prizren. When they pulled the truck from the water, they saw a leg dangling from a partially opened cargo door, and found inside the corpses of people of all ages, including two children. Extracting the bodies had to be done at night. The roads near the Romanian border were busy, and NATO warplanes were active in the area, having begun a bombing campaign to drive Serb forces out of Kosovo that was to last 78 days. ``During the first night we extracted 30 bodies, and during the second night another 53 bodies and body parts sufficient to complete three more corpses,'' Radojkovic said. ``Only one young man had a gunshot chest wound, and his hands were tied with wire,'' said the policeman, speaking in dry, unemotional tones. The rest had ``wounds inflicted with sharp objects or blunt instruments.'' Meanwhile, senior police officials told Radojkovic that the case would be treated as top secret. He was told to stop recording the scene on video, and all photographs and negatives were taken away. Radojkovic said he had no feelings about his task. ``That was the way things had to be done. The war was going on.'' Dragan Karleusa, a captain in the Serbian police based in Belgrade, said it appeared that the bodies from the Danube were reburied at a police training base in Batajnica near the Serb capital, but the identification of those bodies was not yet conclusive. ``The elements that could be acceptable as proof have not been found,'' Karleusa told the court. Karleusa was in charge of investigations into the mass graves that turned up in Serbia after Milosevic was ousted from power in October 2000. At least three have been found so far, all hundreds of miles from Kosovo. Milosevic also denied Karleusa's assertion in his testimony Monday that in March 1999 the former president and his aides had discussed clearing the battlefields in Kosovo to conceal evidence from the tribunal, which had indicted him that month for war crimes. Karleusa relied on statements made during his investigation, and had no firsthand knowledge. ``Do you really believe that the head of state would order anyone to cover up war crimes?'' Milosevic asked the witness. Milosevic claimed that the ``refrigerator-truck case was invented to create a climate'' for his extradition to the U.N. court 13 months ago. In his earlier testimony, Karleusa said orders to remove the bodies to central Serbia, called operation ``Depth 2,'' came from former Interior Minister Vlajko Stojiljkovic, police Gen. Vlastimir Djordjevic and from Gen. Rade Markovic, the chief of the state security service. Markovic, who is serving a one-year prison sentence in Belgrade for destroying secret police files, was brought to The Hague last Friday and will appear this week as a prosecution witness. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-War-Crimes-Milosevic.html?ex=1028454080&ei=1&en=56e7d8e5ee2f7aaf HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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