Posted on 04/24/2009 12:43:21 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
BELGRADE, Serbia — A war crimes court on Thursday found four Serbian former policemen guilty of the massacre of 48 Kosovo Albanians and sentenced them to up to 20 years in prison.
The Serbian court's judges said the victims of the worst single massacre of civilians during the 1998-99 Kosovo war included 14 children, two infants, a pregnant woman and a 100-year-old woman.
After a three-year trial, two of the men were sentenced to a maximum of 20 years in jail, one to 15 years and another to 13 years. All the defendants had denied the charges. Three other men also charged with the killings were found not guilty.
In Serbia, the very fact that the trial was held marked a shift in public policy, as Serbs who fought separatist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo are still revered by many here as war heroes.
The Serb war crimes prosecutors, however, said they would appeal the verdicts, especially because the prime suspect — the commander of the special police unit that carried out the massacre — was acquitted Thursday. ....
The verdict said the defendants rounded up members of one Kosovo Albanian family in their village of Suva Reka in March 1999, killing several men with machine-gun fire before forcing the rest into a pizza restaurant and throwing hand-grenades at them.
Those showing any signs of life were shot in the head and the bodies were transported to a mass grave in Kosovo, where they were initially dumped. One woman lived to tell the story as she played dead before jumping from a truck packed with corpses.
The victims were later reburied in mass graves near a high security police facility outside Belgrade, the Serbian capital, as former President Slobodan Milosevic apparently tried to hide atrocities committed by his troops in Kosovo.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
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The alleged crime happened 10 years ago, the trial took 3 years, the unit commander was acquitted....IMHO there is a fair chance the whole trial is false.
Yet, where are the trials for Kosovo Albanians massacring Serbs and driving several hundred thousand Serbs and non-Albanians out of Kosovo? Nowhere -- because in the Balkans, Muslim lives are "sacred" to the West and Christian lives aren't!
I just hate criminals.
Warcriminals are my favourite...on the “send them to hell” list.
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