U.N. finds 2,100 in Kosovo grave sites

Los Angeles Times

UNITED NATIONS - U.N. war crimes investigators have unearthed 2,108 bodies from grave sites in Kosovo and expect to find more in the coming months, the chief prosecutor told the U.N. Security Council yesterday.

Investigative teams have examined 195 grave sites so far in their efforts to establish evidence of systematic killing this spring of Albanians by Serbian forces, chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte said.

The teams intend to examine 529 sites thought to contain 11,334 bodies, starting first with areas named in charges against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and other Serbian leaders accused of crimes against humanity.

Deputy chief prosecutor Graham Blewitt said that while most of the victims appeared to be Albanian, there were some Serbian victims too.

The investigation provides the first official figures for victims of the war in Kosovo, a separatist province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic. Soon after the 11-week NATO bombing campaign against Milosevic ended, local human rights groups estima ted that at least 10,000 ethnic Albanians had died at Serbian hands.

Del Ponte refused to speculate on final numbers, saying that more than 300 graves had yet to be opened.

"The importance is not the numbers of the victims, but how they were killed"- and by whom, she said. The team is collecting evidence of methods that were organized, premeditated and particularly cruel, she added.

Del Ponte noted that in their five months of work, the teams have found fewer mass graves than had been feared. "We do not, typically, find hundreds of people buried together," she said, but are discovering a large number of smaller sites instead. Of the 195 sites examined so far, only 11 contained more than 50 corpses.

In one of the places previously thought to have as many as 700 victims, a mine at Trepca where soldiers reportedly dumped corpses down mine shafts or dissolved them in acid, the investigators did not find any bodies.

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