The New York Times

Wednesday, June 23, 1999

FBI Aids in Kosovo War Crimes Probe

By The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) -- FBI scientists began the grim work Wednesday of making a criminal case out of death in Kosovo, examining burned and buried bodies in an effort to support war crimes charges against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

A team of 59 scientists, crime scene experts and others will spend a week or more at the sites of two alleged massacres in the town of Djakovica, FBI Director Louis Freeh said.

The investigators will map and photograph the sites where at least 26 people allegedly died. They are searching for evidence such as bullets or blindfolds, and then trying to find out just how the victims died.

The evidence will go to the United Nations war crimes court prosecuting Balkan atrocities. Prosecutors blame Milosevic and four top lieutenants for forced deportations and massacres at Djakovica and elsewhere.

The FBI will try to match bodies to names of alleged victims in a lengthy indictment issued last month against Milosevic and the other four officials in the Serb-led Yugoslav government. The information could be used against Milosevic if he is arrested and brought to trial.

``The province of Kosovo is now one of the largest crime scenes in history,'' Freeh said at a press conference.

Djakovica, in western Kosovo, was one of the places Serbs targeted with particular fury, according to survivors, refugees and war crimes prosecutors.

Residents say Serb police bent on ridding Kosovo of ethnic Albanians set fire to the ancient town's old quarter the night NATO began its airstrikes March 24.

Two nights later, Serb gunmen raided an ethnic Albanian house, separated men from women and children and then killed six men, the war crimes indictment said. The FBI and four investigators from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology plan to exhume those bodies.

In the early hours of April 2, Serb troops rounded up 20 people, crammed them into a basement and opened fire, the indictment said. The troops then allegedly lit the house and the corpses afire.

A list of the dead appended to the indictment includes a 2-year-old child and a 70-year-old woman. Half the victims were children, age 10 or under.

Witnesses who fled Djakovica described a shooting gallery inside the house, and the alleged massacre became one of the most notorious suspected war crimes of the months-long Serb campaign of ethnic terror in Kosovo.

Identifying the dead and determining how they died may be difficult, not only because the bodies were burned but also because Serbs may have tampered with the site later, Freeh said Wednesday.

An undertaker has told NATO authorities he kept a careful accounting of the bodies Serb troops ordered him to bury in Djakovica's town cemetery.

The FBI plans to use that list, as well as the accounts of witnesses and refugees now returning to Kosovo, officials said.

After the initial field work, advanced DNA, ballistics or other testing would be done at the FBI's central laboratory in Washington, said the lab's director, Donald Kerr. The bodies will remain in Kosovo, officials said.

The operation is similar to work the FBI did to investigate war crimes in Bosnia and in Rwanda earlier this decade, Freeh said.

British investigators from Scotland Yard began work earlier this week at another alleged massacre site in Kosovo. The Netherlands, France, Canada, Norway and Sweden are also sending forensic teams.

NATO bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days to try push more than 40,000 Serb troops from Kosovo and stop the killing and harassment of the majority Muslim ethnic Albanian population. Milosevic agreed to a peace pact earlier this month, and the last of his troops left the province last weekend.