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4 NATO officers killed; Serbs say all POWs freed

Three British soldiers were killed when their vehicle hit a mine near Mrkonjic Grad in the northwest. A Swedish soldier died when an armored personnel carrier skidded off a road in the north.

In Ilidza, a Serb-held suburb west of Sarajevo, Lt. Shawn H. Watts was grazed on the neck by a sniper's bullet. The 28-year-old from Greenwood, Miss., returned to duty several hours later.

NATO said it was investigating, but Bosnian Serb army officials in Ilidza said they knew nothing of the shooting.

It was the biggest death toll of any single day of the NATO-led mission since it began Dec. 20. Before yesterday, there were 35 injured and four dead, including a British soldier who killed himself.

Meanwhile, with hundreds of war prisoners released Saturday, it appeared that most of those in captivity before the weekend had been set free.

Croats and Muslims freed about 380 prisoners Saturday at the Sarajevo airport, a neutral site commonly used for such releases. Yesterday, 74 were confirmed released by the Serbs and eight by the Bosnian government.

A Bosnian Serb spokesperson said the release of another 74 outside of Sarajevo accounted for all Serb-held POWs, but the Red Cross could not immediately confirm that.

"There are still people on the (Red Cross) list of 900 who have not been released yet," said Red Cross official Pierre Krahenbuhl in Banja Luka, a Serb-held city in the north.

Red Cross spokesperson Pierre Gauthier said the Bosnian Croats fulfilled their POW release obligations Saturday. However, they still hold about 50 prisoners who are being investigated for possible war crimes.

Gauthier said the Croats had the right to keep them "for a reasonable time."

Red Cross officials complained that in addition to the POW releases, there have been swaps that could amount to "ethnic cleansing."

They were investigating an unsupervised government-Serb exchange of at least 350 civilians Saturday in Sanski Most to see whether they had been expelled or had left of their own will.

The Red Cross also complained the government was believed to hold many people at a military prison in Tuzla, and its delegates had not been allowed to visit them.

Some of the POWs released over the weekend spoke of severe maltreatment by their captors.

Sefik Ademovic, 42, stood forlornly amid a tumultuous welcome accorded many of the released Muslim prisoners by relatives in the front-line Sarajevo suburb of Dobrinja.

Ademovic last saw his wife and two children on July 11, when he fled the U.N. base of Potocari, a few miles north of Srebrenica, a few hours before the eastern enclave fell to Serbs.

A few days later, he was captured by Serbs and moved from one prison to another.

Ademovic said he and others were clubbed and kicked in their Serb prison in Knezina in eastern Bosnia.

"One of them took a knife and sliced my face," he said, stroking a long scar on his left cheek. "I was never so close to death; I thought I would not survive that night."