Serbian Investigators Open Second Muslim Mass Grave
BELGRADE, July 16 (News Agencies) - Serbian investigators have started work on a second mass grave on the grounds of a special police base thought to contain a large number of murdered Muslim Kosovo Albanians, the state news agency Tanjug said Monday.
The grave is at Batajnica, some 15 kilometers (10 miles) northwest of the capital where investigators exhumed around 36 corpses earlier this month, Tanjug quoted a Belgrade district court statement as saying.
It said the second grave contained "a large number of corpses" but gave no further details.
Serbian police confirmed Sunday they had found yet another mass grave thought to contain the corpses of more than 60 Kosovo Albanians presumed to have been killed by Serbian forces, put in a truck and dumped in a reservoir in 1999.
A statement on the Serbian government Internet site said the bodies had been buried in southwest Serbia, on the border of Bosnia, by the former regime after corpses were spotted floating to the surface.
"More than 60 bodies were found in the Perucac hydroelectric plant reservoir," the statement said.
The Perucac discovery bore the hallmarks of a similar attempt to hide bodies in another refrigerated truck recovered from the bed of the Danube river.
The truck contained the bodies of more than 70 elderly people, women and children, thought to have been from the Prizren region in the south of Kosovo. The bodies showed signs of bullet wounds and mutilation.
Thousands of Muslim Albanians went missing during the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict, and the West accused Milosevic's forces of committing widespread atrocities.
Milosevic is now awaiting trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague for his alleged part in war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the province.
The head of the organized crime unit, Dragan Karleusa, has openly accused Milosevic and his supporters of ordering the destruction of evidence of crimes committed by Serbian forces against the ethnic Muslim Albanian civilian population.
He said that some 800 Muslim Albanians are thought to have been buried in mass graves around Belgrade, including at the Batajnica site.
Some 2,500 Albanians are still listed as missing, two years after the end of the conflict.
