Kosovo Albanian gets 40 years for Serb bus bombing
An ethnic Albanian man was sentenced to 40 years in prison for a 2001 bus bombing that killed 11 Serbs in one of Kosovo's worst single attacks since the 1998-99 war.
(KosovoCompromise Staff) Monday, June 09, 2008
Florim Ejupi was convicted of planting and detonating a bomb that destroyed a bus carrying Serb pilgrims heading to the monastery town of Gracanica, minutes after the convoy entered Kosovo from central Serbia.
"A massive explosion hit the first bus of the convoy carrying 57 ethnic Serb passengers," the U.N. mission administering Kosovo since the war said in a statement. "The bombing killed 11 civilians of Serbian ethnicity and injured 22 others."
Ejupi was convicted of 11 counts of murder and dozens of counts of attempted murder, as well as terrorism, causing general danger, racial and other discrimination and unlawful possession of explosives.
The sentence was handed down by a panel of three international judges.
Ejupi was arrested but escaped from the U.S. military base Bondsteel in Kosovo in April 2001. He was re-arrested in Albania in 2004.
