WORLD BRIEFING / SERBIA
Four former members of a notorious Serbian paramilitary unit called the Scorpions were convicted of gunning down 14 Kosovo Albanian civilians, including children and the elderly, in 1999, and were sentenced to between 15 and 20 years in prison.
The massacre in Kosovo’s northern town of Podujevo was one of the most brutal single atrocities during the 1998-99 Kosovo war, during which an estimated 10,000 people were killed in fighting between guerrillas of the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army and Serbian forces loyal to President Slobodan Milosevic. The Podujevo massacre took place at the start of the NATO bombing of Serbia that was launched to stop a government crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists.
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