Serbia arrests ex-paramilitaries linked with Kosovo crimes

Oct 19, 2007, 8:48 GMT

Belgrade - Serbian police have arrested four former paramilitaries in connection with a war crime in Kosovo, local agencies said Friday.

Members of the Scorpions unit, which operated in wars in former Yugoslavia, were arrested in Sremska Mitrovica, 40 kilometres west of Belgrade.

They were held in connection with the 1999 killing of Kosovo Albanian civilians in Podujevo during the war in the province, the interior ministry said.

A member of the unit, Sasa Cvjetan, was already sentenced to 20 years in prison for the killing of 14 Albanians and the wounding of five children in Podujevo in March 1999.

Four other Scorpions were handed between five and 20 years in prison for taking part in the massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica in Bosnia, in the summer of 1995.

The unit was set up from mostly shadowy volunteers willing to fight in the early days of the Yugoslav wars, around Vukovar in Croatia in late 1991.

After fighting in Bosnia ended in late 1995, the secretive paramilitaries were formally induced into the Serbian police reserve, but its role and position within the chain of command remained murky.

The Scorpions drew worldwide attention when a video-recording of the execution of four Muslims near Srebrenica was aired in 2005. Only then - a decade after 8,000 people were killed at Srebrenica - did Serbia move to prosecute its members.

Serbia is currently struggling to persuade Brussels that it is doing enough for the initialling of a stabilization and association agreement which would take the troubled Balkan country a step closer to EU membership.

However, UN war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte insists that Belgrade must first bring to justice the man believed the most responsible for Srebrenica and other atrocities - the Bosnian Serb wartime commander Ratko Mladic, who remains at large in Serbia.