Mass grave of Kosovo victims is found

BELGRADE, Serbia - Acting on tips from witnesses, Serbian war-crimes prosecutors have discovered a mass grave believed to contain the bodies of 250 Albanians who were killed in Kosovo during the 1998-99 war there, then transported to Serbia and secretly buried to hide the atrocities, officials said Monday.

The burial site - hidden beneath a small building and a newly built parking lot - is the fourth mass grave of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo to be found in Serbia since 2001. Two others were discovered in Kosovo. In each case, most of the bodies were those of civilians, including women and children.

The latest discovery is another example of the mass atrocities that were committed during the bloody Serb crackdown against Kosovo separatists that killed at least 10,000 people and left nearly a million displaced.

Hundreds of bodies of slain ethnic Albanians have been exhumed in Serbia and returned to Kosovo since Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was ousted from power in a popular revolt in 2000. The previously discovered mass graves in Serbia represented the bulk of genocide charges filed against Milosevic at a U.N. war-crimes tribunal in the Netherlands, where he died of a heart attack during his trial in 2006.

Serbia has since tried to deal with its wartime past as it seeks European Union membership, which requires the prosecution of those who committed atrocities during the 1990s wars in the Balkans. Milosevic's policies still have strong support among ultranationalists in Serbia.

Serbia's war-crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic said at a news conference Monday that exhumations would begin soon at the newly found mass grave. It was discovered based on witness accounts and in cooperation with an EU mission in Kosovo.

Vukcevic's office said the grave was in a hilly, rural area of Rudnica, near the town of Raska, 108 miles south of Belgrade. Officials did not say when it was found.

About 1,860 ethnic Albanians are still missing from the Kosovo war, many believed to have been buried by Serb forces in similar mass graves in Serbia.

Vukcevic urged Kosovo's authorities to investigate the fate of about 500 Kosovo Serbs who he said remained unaccounted for since the 1998-99 war after revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians.