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Reuters, 7 décembre 1999
Bodies of Kosovo Serbs found in Pristina apartment
01:13 p.m Dec 07, 1999 Eastern
By Andrew Gray
PRISTINA, Dec 7 (Reuters) - Kosovo's
international police force said on Tuesday an
elderly Serb woman and her son had been found
shot dead in a Pristina apartment after
apparently lying undiscovered for around a
week.
Coming the day after the publication of a major
human rights study which documented the wave
of revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians which
has swept Kosovo, news of the discovery once
again highlighted the plight of Kosovo's Serb
minority.
A member of the public had found the bodies of
the woman, aged around 63, and her son,
about 33 years old, after a seven-year old child
noticed their apartment door was open and
detected a strong stench from inside, a police
spokesman said.
The victims, found in the central Dardania
district of the Kosovo capital, appeared to have
been dead between seven and 10 days,
spokesman Gilles Moreau told Reuters.
``It's a new case but an old murder,'' he said.
More than 220,000 Serbs and members of other
minority groups have fled Kosovo, according to
Yugoslav local authorities, during and after
NATO's 11-week bombing campaign to end Serb
repression of the territory's ethnic Albanian
majority.
The Serbs' postwar fate is one of the central
themes of a report by the Organisation for
Security and Cooperation in Europe released on
Monday. It says Albanians have adopted a view
of collective guilt with regard to Serb atrocities
against them.
``The entire remaining Kosovo Serb population
was seen as a target for Kosovo Albanians,''
said the second part of the report, dealing with
the period from June to October this year.
It also calls for a a probe into frequent accounts
that the Kosovo Liberation Army former guerrilla
group has been involved in the continuing
violence in the province. KLA leaders deny thay
have been behind any attacks.
The first part of the OSCE report gathers
witness testimony of the campaign of terror in
Kosovo by Serb forces in Kosovo which ended
with their withdrawal in June and the arrival of
the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force.
Trying to prevent attacks on Serbs and other
minorities has been one of KFOR's toughest
tasks.
KFOR said on Tuesday that U.S. forces had
arrested four people, all believed to be ethnic
Albanians, suspected of involvement in a bomb
attack on a Serb home in eastern Kosovo in
which one woman died and two men were
injured.
Moreau confirmed the dead man and woman in
Pristina had been on a KFOR list of vulnerable
people and a patrol had visited their home
recently.
The soldiers had received no reply when they
knocked on the door but noticed nothing amiss
and, as the apartment was still secure, assumed
they had been visiting relatives in the area.
In another sign of what investigators describe
as a ``culture of silence'' among the local
population when they try to track down
criminals, Moreau said none of the neighbours
had been able to shed any light on the killings so
far.
``We can't help this population if they don't
want to help themselves,'' he said.
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