Macedonian Troops Accused of Rampage

Ethnic Albanians on Tuesday accused government troops of rampaging through their village near Macedonia’s capital, killing civilians and burning houses. The government said five ethnic Albanians were killed but that none was a civilian.

International officials who visited the village of Ljuboten confirmed that bodies had been found but would not say how many.

The accusation against the government came the same day that ethnic Albanian guerrillas agreed to hand their weapons to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in a huge boost for a landmark political accord to end discrimination against the minority Albanians, diplomatic and rebel sources said.

Rebel reluctance to disarm before the sweeping range of reforms took effect was overcome when the government promised the guerrillas amnesty and a definite timetable for minority rights, the sources said.

Government forces pounded Ljuboten with mortars and tanks Sunday in an offensive that officials said was in response to a land mine that killed eight soldiers two days before.

The few ethnic Albanians who remained in Ljuboten on Tuesday said police entered the village Sunday and killed at least nine civilians, burned and looted 25 houses and killed as many as five dozen sheep and cattle. The victims’ bodies, scattered on the streets, remained unburied until Tuesday.

“There are seven killed civilians who have been summarily executed,” Iljaz Bajrami, a Ljuboten resident, said by telephone.

“Apart from the seven, we earlier buried two others in the courtyards of private houses,” he said.

Harald Schenker, a spokesman for a delegation of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that visited Ljuboten on Tuesday, said that “some bodies have been found.” He declined to elaborate.

Amanda Williamson, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said police refused to let them into Ljuboten.

A police spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, denied that a massacre occurred and that police were blocking access to international organizations.

Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski said five ethnic Albanians who were killed in the fighting belonged to a “terrorist group.”