Serbian court clears ex-policemen of role in US brothers' killing

Sep 22, 2009, 13:00 GMT

Belgrade - A Serbian war crimes tribunal on Tuesday cleared two former policemen of involvement in the murder of three US citizens of Kosovo Albanian descent.

Sreten Popovic and Milos Stojanovic, former members of Serbian special police units, were acquitted of new charges that they 'withheld the right (of victims') to a fair trial' and 'torturing' them.

It is unclear when the prosecution changed the original indictment, which accused Popovic and Stojanovic of handing the victims to 'unidentified' policemen who then killed them.

The two have been the only people charged so far in connection with the execution of Ilijem, Mehmet and Agron Bitici, United States nationals whose family had emigrated from Kosovo.

No other indictments were handed down, though more than 200 people testified during two years of proceedings. The Bitici family representative said the trial was marred by defence hampering the process and police refusing to cooperate in identifying the killers.

The representative, Serbian human rights activist Natasa Kandic, withdrew from the trial in June, saying it 'is not leading to justice ... but is designed to protect those who ordered the cruel killing.'

Several high-ranking police officers were investigated, some arrested during the investigation, but none were indicted apart from the two cleared on Tuesday.

The Bitici brothers were arrested in June 1999, days after the war in Kosovo ended, for illegally entering the province. It was a minor violation for which they were handed a 15-day prison sentence, to be served in Prokuplje, 250 kilometres south of Belgrade.

Instead of being released after they served their time, on July 8, 1999 they were led out and handed to unidentified police commandos.

The brothers' actual killers remain unknown.

The bodies of the Bitici brothers were found atop a mass grave near a police commando compound at Petrovo Selo in eastern Serbia, in 2001.

The investigation determined that they were executed three days after they were led out of the prison, killed with their hands cuffed behind their backs with shots to the back of their heads.

There were 67 more bodies buried beneath them at Petrovo Selo. The others were Kosovo Albanians killed in their villages during the war, then brought for mass burials in Serbia proper in a bid by Slobodan Milosevic's regime to hide atrocities.

Several more mass graves of Albanians were found in 2001 and 2002, the largest of them, with nearly 900 bodies, discovered at another police compound, in Batajnica on the outskirts of Belgrade.

The trial of top-ranking Serbian police officers held responsible for the crimes in Kosovo is ongoing at the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague.