http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/26/world/europe/26kosovo.html
NEW YORK TIMES (USA) August 26, 2006 2 Serbs Charged With Killing 3 Albanian-American Brothers in 1999 By NICHOLAS WOOD BUCHAREST, Romania, Aug. 25 - Serbia's war crimes prosecution office has charged two former Serbian police officers in connection with the killings of three Albanian-American brothers from Long Island who went missing in Serbia in 1999 and whose bodies were later found in a mass grave. The two men, Sreten Popovic and Milos Stojanovic, members of an elite Serbian police unit in Kosovo during the 1999 conflict between government forces and ethnic Albanian separatists, are accused of having had the three taken from a prison to a police training camp, where they were later executed. The indictments, brought Thursday, say the two former policemen violated the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war in their handling of the brothers. The three, residents of Hampton Bays, had come to Kosovo, the southern Serbian province, in 1999 to join ethnic Albanian guerrillas who were fighting Serbian forces there. The charges carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. A third former police officer was detained in May but has not been charged. The United States Embassy in Belgrade welcomed the announcement, but it also urged the Serbian authorities to try other police officers suspected of crimes. The three brothers - Ylli, Mehmet and Agron Bytyqi, all in their 20's - were detained on Kosovo's boundary with the rest of Serbia on June 26, 1999, two weeks after the end of the Kosovo conflict. The brothers' relatives say that when they were detained, they were helping a Gypsy escape persecution by ethnic Albanian refugees returning to Kosovo after the fighting. Serbian prosecutors say that the brothers were taken by members of Serbia's special police from a prison in Prokuplje, in southern Serbia, where they were serving a 15-day sentence on charges of illegally entering the country, and that they were driven to a training camp outside Petrovo Selo, a town near Serbia's border with Romania. Their bodies were found in July 2001 in a mass grave on the edge of the camp, with their hands bound and bullet wounds to the back of their heads. The war crimes prosecutors assigned to the investigation said earlier this year said they believed that the brothers were killed in revenge for the NATO-led air campaign waged against Serbian forces to stop repression of ethnic Albanians. The formal investigation began in March, when Mr. Popovic and Mr. Stojanovic were arrested. Mr. Popovic was a colonel in the Serbian gendarmerie, a special police force for antiterrorism operations, until this year. While the indictments were welcomed by human rights groups in Serbia, a leading rights lawyer accused the Serbian judiciary of being slow to prosecute senior police and military officials accused of war crimes. Natasa Kandic, the director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, said the authorities had failed to prevent the flight of two senior commanders suspected of involvement in the killings of the three brothers as well as other crimes during the Balkan wars of the 1990's. One of these, Gen. Goran Radosavljevic, the commander of special police units accused of executing the men, left Serbia earlier this year and his whereabouts are unknown. Gen. Vlastimir Djordjevic, accused by Serbian prosecutors of ordering the brothers' killings, left Kosovo after the fall from power of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president, in 2000. Serbian and United Nations investigators have said they believe that he is hiding in Moscow. =============== Group Moderator: [EMAIL PROTECTED] page at http://magazine.sorabia.net for more informations about current situation in Serbia http://www.sorabia.net Slusajte GLAS SORABIJE nas talk internet-radio (Serbian Only) http://radio.sorabia.net Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sorabia/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
