The New York Times

Friday, June 25, 1999

ATROCITIES

F.B.I. Team Looks for Evidence of Massacres

By JOHN KIFNER

JAKOVICA, Yugoslavia -- FBI forensic teams began sifting through evidence Thursday morning at two houses that are believed to be massacre sites in hopes of helping the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic and other Serbian leaders charged with war crimes.

Laying out piles of shiny new equipment -- shovels, big screens for sifting dirt and ashes and two huge electric generators -- the FBI team went to scenes cited in the indictment brought in May by the International Tribunal for War Crimes in the former Yugoslavia.

One was the house where a survivor, Hani Hoxha, has told of the mass killing of about 20 people, including his wife, three daughters and grandchildren. The dead belonged to three related families who had tried to hide in the house of one family, the Vesas.

The second site was a nearby house on Ymer Grezda Street, where the indictment says six men were executed.

Yellow police tape reading, "Crime scene -- Do not enter," was stretched on both sides of the street in front of the Vesa house.

The crime scene was hardly pristine. Journalists have been going through it for almost two weeks, and the site had been unattended for more than two months.

Also, the bodies in the houses had already been buried, according to Faton Pollushka, the municipal official in charge of disposing bodies here, who added that there were barely enough remains to fill one grave.

David J. Scheffer, the State Department's ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, said at a news conference that the two sites that the FBI was investigating were "only representative" of the Serbian massacres of Albanian civilians and that new "atrocity sites are popping up every day," found by journalists or NATO forces.

Milosevic and other senior officials were charged with crimes against humanity in Kosovo, including the murder, forced deportation and persecution of ethnic Albanians.