NATO Hands Over 10 Held in Bosnia Raid

NATO peacekeepers Friday turned over to an angry Bosnian government 10 alleged Islamic terrorists, including two apparent instructors from Iran, captured here during a raid on this remote mountaintop a day earlier.

In the Bosnian Serb headquarters of Pale, meanwhile, a top NATO commander met for the first time in more than a week with a Bosnian Serb military leader, raising hopes that a resumption of regular Serbian contacts with the peacekeeping mission may be possible.

“We’re back on track,” NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana told The Times in an interview in Brussels.

The decision to turn over the suspected terrorists came despite statements by Adm. Leighton W. Smith, the NATO commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina who toured the snow-swept site of the raid, that “disturbing evidence” was uncovered showing that a three-story sportsmen’s lodge here has been used by the Bosnian government and foreign military forces to train terrorists.

“It doesn’t take a genius to figure out we found something that is an abomination,” Smith told reporters. “No one can escape the obvious, that this is a terrorist training activity going on in this building, and it has direct association with people in the [Bosnian] government.”

A NATO spokesman said Smith agreed to release the 10 men to Bosnian authorities--an 11th detainee was set free Friday after it was determined he was a diplomat from the Iranian Embassy in Sarajevo--only after receiving assurances from Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic that they would be subjected to criminal investigation.

“The Bosnian government has the clear obligation to deal with these people within their own system of justice,” NATO Col. Brian Hoey said. “IFOR [the NATO peacekeeping Implementation Force] does not have courts or judges or juries or prisons to deal with these matters. We can detain and investigate, but in the end we must turn them over.”

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But the Bosnian government made it clear Friday that it does not consider the men militant extremists, saying they were being trained to hunt war criminals, not to launch terrorist attacks against IFOR--as some U.S. officials originally speculated--or anyone else.

The government officials blasted the NATO military action as “unnecessary and inappropriate,” though they agreed to investigate allegations against the detained men. Izetbegovic, however, said in a television interview that the government would not close similar training centers elsewhere.

“We have more places like that in Bosnia for training people to hunt war criminals,” Izetbegovic said. “We will continue that activity.”

Muhamed Sacirbey, Bosnian ambassador to the United Nations, said in an interview that the timing of the NATO raid--just in advance of today’s summit in Rome on how to correct the troubled peace accord--raised questions about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s true motives and pointed to “a certain level of hysteria” in the West about Iranians in Bosnia.

Sacirbey said the Bosnian government has made no secret that foreign instructors have been used to train special anti-terrorist units, including at Podgovrelica. But, he said, the government had agreed to stop working with foreign military personnel, all of whom had been instructed to leave Bosnia by Jan. 19, a date specified in the peace accord reached last fall in Dayton, Ohio.

“Nobody from IFOR came to us and said we have an indication that something is going on here. Instead they launched an obviously one-sided military operation,” Sacirbey said. “Now we are being identified as part of the problem, which is most unfortunate, because our interest is to cooperate with IFOR.”

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The raid on the sportsmen’s lodge uncovered what NATO officials described as a cache of terrorist materials, including everything from rocket launchers to children’s toys that had been booby-trapped to explode when touched. NATO troops found classroom notebooks, textbooks in Persian and an apparent blueprint to capture a Bosnian Serb officer at the post office in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital.

Even after the NATO troops, who numbered in the hundreds and arrived by air and ground, left the lodge Friday afternoon, a reporter roaming through the ransacked building found countless traces of the training activities. Access to the lodge provided a rare public glimpse into the secretive world of terrorist and anti-terrorist training.

A large photograph of Izetbegovic hung from the wall in the entry hall not far from a bookcase stuffed with Persian-language newspapers and books, including one titled “Mission to Tehran.”

Down the hallway, a walk-in closet was stuffed with military uniforms, while upstairs an entire room was dedicated to disguise techniques. Hair dye, artificial facial hair, countless shades of makeup and tinted contact lenses sat on counters and were stored in cabinets.

On the same floor, there was a photo lab with black-and-white pictures of moving cars and pedestrians posted on the wall, while on the top floor walls had been torn down to make large classrooms.

Telephones were in virtually every room, and there was evidence of computers, video recorders, televisions and other electronic devices in a part of Bosnia where most houses are lucky to receive electricity. Two satellite dishes sat atop the roof.

The resumption of high-level military contacts between IFOR and the Bosnian Serbs, meanwhile, came during a meeting in Pale between Lt. Gen. Michael Walker, who heads NATO’s rapid-reaction corps in Bosnia, and Bosnian Serb Gen. Zdravko Tolimir, second-in-command to Gen. Ratko Mladic.

NATO officials said the meeting lasted several hours but led to no firm commitment to meet again.

Times staff writer Tyler Marshall in Brussels contributed to this report.