Albanian charged of killing 14 Serbs in 1999 is arrested
An ethnic Albanian charged with murdering 14 Serb villagers in one of the bloodiest ethnic attacks during U.N. administration of Kosovo was arrested on Tuesday, authorities said.
(KosovoCompromise Staff) Wednesday, October 17, 2007
The man was arrested at his home in eastern Kosovo close to where the 14 were shot dead in a field while bringing in the wheat harvest in July 1999, soon after the province came under United Nations and NATO control.
Police spokesman Veton Elshani said U.N. special police units arrested a suspect charged with committing war crimes, but gave no further details. He was identified by media as Mazllum Bytyqi.
"U.N. police, Kosovo police and KFOR are still searching for weapons in the village," said Elshani. "The man arrested is from Veliki Alas, near the village where these people were killed."
A British patrol in 1999 found the victims of the massacre after hearing automatic weapon fire near the town of Staro Gracko, 16 kilometers south from Pristina.
Also on Tuesday, the terrorist Albanian National Army (ANA) was threatening to take over control of the northern part of Kosovo, near the administrative line with central Serbia.
The group said they would make the move "in the event of KFOR, UNMIK, Kosovo police and the Kosovo Protection Corps failing to do so by November 1."
Gafur Adili, a man identified as an ANA spokesman, made the statement in an interview for the Pristina Albanian-language daily Epoka e Re [New World], specifying that the armed men wearing camouflage gear, whom Kosovo's public broadcaster RTK recently presented as ANA members, were "villagers from the areas close to the administrative border between Kosovo and Serbia."
ANA is a group which former UNMIK chief Michael Steiner in 2003 declared a terrorist organization, following a series of attempted terrorist attacks in Kosovo.
