KOSOVO AND METOHIJA

INVESTIGATION ON SUVA REKA OPENS CASE OF MASS GRAVE IN BATAJNICA

BELGRADE, October 26 (Beta)-A group of nine individuals, suspected of killing 48 civilians in the Kosovo village of Suva Reka, were arrested on October 26 and brought before an investigating judge of the Belgrade District Court's war crimes council, war crimes prosecution spokesman Bruno Vekaric has said.

On a visit to Sarajevo, Vekaric told journalists that the detention of the suspects had opened the case of a mass grave in the Belgrade suburb of Batajnica, to which the bodies of Suva Reka Kosovo Albanians were believed to have been transported.

The war crimes prosecution on October 3 submitted a demand for an investigation of the nine suspects, six of whom are active Serbian police officers, Vekaric said.

Out of the 48 civilians murdered in Suva Reka in March 1999, 14 were under 15 years of age, including two babies. Among the victims were a 24yearold pregnant woman and a 100yearold woman.

The investigation concerning the Suva Reka crime was hinted at in late September by sources of Balkan Insight, the Web issue of the Balkan Investigation and Research Network (BIRN), as well as by Humanitarian Law Fund lawyer Dragoljub Todorovic. He then told BETA that he had found out "a process for Batajnica" would be launched soon, but failed to go into detail.

According to Balkan Insight, among the suspects are a former police squad commander and member of the special police forces headquarters in Kosovo, a former police chief in a Kosovo town, a former commander of a local police station in Kosovo, the commander's assistant, and a group assigned to kill, which aside from regular policemen included two secret police officers.

With the exception of two, the others are still working in the police and some hold very responsible positions, Balkan Insight reported.

According to the statements collected by the war crimes prosecution, the mass murder in Suva Reka took place on March 26, 1999, when Serbian forces conducted a detailed search of the Kosovo village, under the pretext that they were looking for weapons.

The mass grave in Batajnica is one of the three uncovered in Serbia in the spring of 2001. Over the next three years, around 1,100 bodies of Kosovo Albanians were exhumed from the three mass graves.

The most corpses, 980, were found at a police shooting range in Batajnica, 77 were discovered at a special police forces' practice grounds in the eastern Serbian village of Petrovo Selo and another 48 were located near the Perucac lake, close to the border with Bosnia Herzegovina.

The Serbian Interior Ministry in May 2001 announced that the transport of bodies of Kosovo Albanians, killed in Serbian police operations, and their burial at secret locations in Serbia had been arranged in the office of former Serbian and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, in March 1999.