4 Westerners Held in Yugoslavia as Saboteurs

The Yugoslav army said Thursday that it had arrested two Britons and two Canadians carrying military equipment and explosives in Montenegro and suggested that the four were specialists in sabotage.

It said a patrol arrested them Tuesday night along the Montenegrin boundary with Kosovo, adding that they may have been training police in Montenegro, whose pro-Western leaders oppose Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

“Yugoslav army personnel mounted an efficient action and arrested four armed foreign citizens with military equipment, demolition equipment,” the army said.

The Kosovo office of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the Britons were two missing OSCE personnel who worked for a police training school in Kosovo, which is a province of Serbia, and had been on holiday in Montenegro, which, with Serbia, forms what remains of Yugoslavia.

“They were on vacation,” said Laura O’Mahoney, press officer for the OSCE. She stressed that the police instructors were not armed and did not carry out regular police duties in Kosovo, only training.

Police photographs and film clips of the four men, wearing casual shirts, were shown on state television with pictures of personal belongings and coils of wire.

There was a hand-drawn map with military objects labeled in Serbian, the phrase “I can’t be sure this is right” scrawled in English and an official stamp bearing the Canadian maple leaf.

Television also showed pictures of Yugoslav troops scouring hills and unidentified men planting explosives.

Britain’s Foreign Office summoned Yugoslavia’s representative in London to press for information about the arrests, saying there was no evidence that the men were involved in terrorism or spying.

Canadian Defense Minister Arthur Eggleton said that his countrymen who were arrested were not in the military and that he understood them to be businessmen.

The arrests come amid a sharpening of tensions in Yugoslavia ahead of September elections and on the heels of an announcement by Yugoslav officials that four Dutchmen planning to kill or kidnap Milosevic had been arrested in a nearby area of Serbia.

The OSCE identified the Britons as Adrian Prangnell and John Yore and the Canadians as Shuan Going and Liam Hall.

The agency said the Canadians were aid workers in Kosovo.