Slain Serbs Bear Signs of Execution, NATO Says

Offering chilling new evidence of widespread, calculated revenge slayings by ethnic Albanians, a top NATO investigator said Wednesday that the majority of killings under investigation in and around Kosovo’s capital are apparent executions in which the Serbian victims had their hands bound and were made to kneel before being shot in the head.

These characteristics were common in “dozens” of slayings committed since NATO-led peacekeepers occupied Kosovo on June 12, said British Maj. John Wooldridge, a senior investigator with the Royal Military Police. Wooldridge deemed the killings “executions” by Albanians in which ethnic hatred is the presumed motive.

“The vast majority of the murders we are investigating are murders where the person has been made to kneel, their hands have been tied behind their backs and, in a lot of cases, they’ve been blindfolded,” Wooldridge said. The victims were then shot, most with a single bullet to the back of the head.

Of more than 200 killings in Kosovo since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led peace force moved in, about 120 occurred in the British sector.

NATO and United Nations officials have for weeks denounced revenge killings, but Wooldridge’s comments in an interview with The Times provided the most detailed official description to date of the violence. Prior accounts had not indicated that the slayings were so coldly calculated.

Wooldridge, the top criminal investigator in the British-controlled sector of Kosovo, which includes Pristina, said Serbs were not the only ones being killed. But he said the rate of killings of Serbs--who numbered about 200,000 or about 10% of the population before the conflict--was far higher than among the ethnic Albanian majority.

More than 172,060 people, mostly Serbs and Gypsies, had fled Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia, since the Yugoslav government signed a peace agreement with NATO, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees reported in Belgrade on July 26.

During the war, Serbian forces drove hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from their homes in a campaign of killing, looting and harassment. Now, many Serbs accuse the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army and those affiliated with it of carrying out revenge killings against their Serbian enemies and their families.

Wooldridge refused to discuss the execution-style killings in more detail, including the exact number and location of bodies found.

However, he said the bodies of seven slain Serbs were found within several hundred yards of one another at a popular trash dumping site over a three-week period last month. He said most of the seven were bound at the hands, blindfolded and shot in the back of the head.

“I think it would be difficult at this point to say that there’s an ethnic Albanian death squad going around committing these murders,” Wooldridge said. “It could be there are several groups going around committing murders in the same way, perhaps even exchanging weapons.”

He said that he is aware of anecdotal evidence of similar killings elsewhere in the province but that he cannot comment on crimes outside his area of responsibility.

Neither U.N. officials nor officials from the KLA could be reached late Tuesday, as the city was in a blackout for several hours, and neither conventional nor cellular telephone service was functioning.

Hashim Thaci, the KLA’s political leader, has denied that his group is involved in such slayings, and he has called for an end to the killings.

Some of the killings seemed even more vicious than the execution-style slayings.

On Monday night, in one of five killings in Pristina, an elderly Serbian woman had her head held under water in a bathtub until she drowned. Her hands were tied and she was gagged, Wooldridge said.

“You can’t tell me they had to do that,” he said. “She needed a cane to walk. She’s not going to be the strongest woman in the world.”

Within hours after the attack, Wooldridge said, a young ethnic Albanian couple had moved into her apartment.

The new details about the scope of the revenge killings come on the heels of the mass slaying of 14 Serbian farmers in a small village about 10 miles south of here. Five ethnic Albanians were arrested in the killings. Two are still being held. Wooldridge said his investigators have assembled strong evidence against the suspects, including weapons and ammunition seized from their homes that appear to match those used in the attack.

Still, the violence is taking a toll on peacekeepers’ efforts to establish a multiethnic society in a region beset by conflict. Most Serbs who live in cities or ethnically mixed villages are afraid to leave their houses.

Last weekend, 450 Serbs were led from their village by U.S. troops in the NATO-led Kosovo Force, or KFOR, because the villagers were afraid to stay and afraid to travel the road alone. Initially, it was believed that the families were bound for Serbia proper, but they are now thought to have settled in wholly Serbian villages in the surrounding area.

“These are regrettable events,” a KFOR press release said. “We hope that the people who have left will feel confident enough to return with the gradual buildup of peace and stability.”

British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, the commander of the peacekeeping forces, said in a recent interview that, ultimately, the answer lies not with NATO, but with changing people’s attitudes.

“What sort of a society is it when you’ve got to put a soldier on one side of an old lady to buy a loaf of bread? . . . What is true is that some Albanians--and I hope it’s a very few--have behaved in a way that is too reminiscent of the people who just left,” Jackson said.

“No police force in the world can guarantee security,” he said. “The answer to this kind of problem is to change the cycle of violence in the Balkans. KFOR is not the answer.”

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is trying to force those who fled to go back to a territory that Serbs consider the crucible of their culture.

Serbian Orthodox Bishop Artemije, who told anti-Milosevic protesters on Monday that the Yugoslav president should stand trial on war crimes charges, says Serbs are now the victims of “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo.

While Orthodox clerics are “well aware” of the “horrendous crimes” committed before the war ended, Artemije said, the current attacks against Serbs are “much greater a crime” because they were perpetrated during peacetime.

“Now the Albanians are oppressing Serbs and are committing the same crimes against Serbs and non-Albanian communities which were committed against the Kosovo Albanians in the time of Milosevic’s regime,” Artemije wrote to Jackson and Bernard Kouchner, the U.N.’s top representative in Kosovo.

Times staff writers Paul Watson in Belgrade and Valerie Reitman in Pristina contributed to this report.