French Plotted to Kill Milosevic, Yugoslavia Says

Five men were accused Thursday of being behind a “terrorist” group that the government here said had planned to assassinate President Slobodan Milosevic.

A senior government official said the men, arrested on Yugoslav territory last week by the country’s security service, belonged to an organization called Spider, which he said took instructions from Paris.

“We have arrested a number of French spies,” Yugoslav Information Secretary Goran Matic told a news conference. “France was caught red-handed.”

An official traveling with French President Jacques Chirac in London called the accusations “fantasies.”

At a briefing for reporters during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 11-week air war against Yugoslavia, Matic claimed that hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanian refugees were in fact actors paid to walk in circles for TV cameras.

On Thursday, Matic said the arrested men had plotted several scenarios for assassinating Milosevic, including a sniper attack, a car bomb and an assault on the Serbian leader’s residence.

He also said French intelligence had been present in the territory of the former Yugoslav federation for a decade and had been involved in liquidating “undesired citizens.”

During NATO’s bombing campaign, Matic said, the arrested men had infiltrated the Yugoslav army in Kosovo, killed ethnic Albanians and looted their houses.

He said that the group’s leader had dual Yugoslav and French citizenship and that the man had claimed during interrogation that he had killed about 50 people on behalf of French intelligence. Matic also accused him of involvement in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina.