The New York Times

Monday, June 21, 1999

EVIDENCE

War-Crimes Experts Comb First Site on List

By IAN FISHER

VELIKA KRUSA, Yugoslavia -- Dressed in masks and white coveralls, forensics experts with the international war-crimes tribunal are collecting evidence in a house here where the bodies of perhaps three dozen Kosovo Albanians lay in charred heaps.

This is the first site to be investigated among the seven believed to be sites of massacres cited in the war-crimes indictment against President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and other top Yugoslav leaders. John Bunn, head of the British forensic team here from Scotland Yard, called the site "a high priority."

"There are people there who died pretty horrible deaths," he said, standing down the road from the site, a one-floor farmhouse blocked off from view by plastic crime-scene tape, tanks and German soldiers.

There are perhaps hundreds of places across Kosovo where Albanians were apparently massacred by Serbs over the last two months, and new mass grave sites and bodies are being discovered virtually every day.

War-crimes investigators have frankly conceded that they cannot look into all of them and will concentrate on the sites with the greatest number of dead and those listed in the indictment. "If we went to every site we wouldn't have enough soldiers" to guard them, said Bunn, a detective chief superintendent at Scotland Yard.

That presents the risk that there will be enough interference with some sites that they will be useless for evidence for any war-crimes trial. At the village of Meja, north of here, where witnesses have said 100 or more people were killed, six bodies lying in the open have been moved around since last week, probably by people looking for some sign of identification.

Some Kosovo villagers are returning to their battered homes, some littered with bodies, with a clear eye toward providing evidence to the tribunal. On Sunday, villagers from Senovce disinterred three bodies that they said had been buried in a neighboring town by Serbs.

They said that one of the victims, identified as Shaban Krasniqi, a 54-year-old farmer, was tortured -- his ears cut off, his right eye gouged out, teeth knocked from his lower jaw.

Before they reburied him, along with one of the others, on a slope with a broad view, his fellow villagers videotaped the bodies. "It will make it much easier for people, the tribunal, to investigate," said Isuf Krasniqi, 45, the victim's cousin. "That is why we videotaped them."

Evidence of the killings here in Velika Krusa -- Krush-e-Madhe to the Albanians -- which took place on March 25, the day after NATO began bombing Yugoslav targets, was also captured on videotape, which is perhaps another reason why the killings are being investigated early on. The tape, shot by a villager, shows the bodies of at least 17 men.

Audi Duraku, 41, a villager who said he was hiding down a gravel road when the killings took place, said that Serb policemen brought many people -- he did not know how many -- in a truck to the house here on the afternoon of March 25. About 3:30 p.m., he said, nine Serb paramilitary group members in uniforms went into the house. He heard shooting outside in the back, then the house went up in flames.

After hiding for two hours, he said, he went to the house and found two bodies beneath his tractor, which was parked near the house. But he said he did not find blood outside where he heard the shooting, leading him to believe that the Serbs fired into the air and then burned the victims alive.

His family fled to Albania, and he said he will probably not live here anymore. "There is no life here," he said. "You can't live in this village."

There are signs that the Serbs made several attempts to cover up evidence of the killings.

In Postoselo, the village next to Sanovce, Krasniqi said, Serbs dug up 104 bodies, most of them old men who he said were killed on March 31. On Sunday, Krasniqi, who said he helped bury the bodies several days after the killings, stood on one of the empty graves, which lay in two long rows now clumped with dug-up dirt.

"They took these bodies away to wipe out any trace," he said.