A bomb attack on a bus convoy that was carrying more than 250 Serbs to a religious ceremony in Kosovo, has claimed the lives of at least seven people, including women and children, and injured more than 40.

(photos: KIM Info Archive 2001)

(BBC) Ethnic Albanian extremists, who are trying to drive Serbs out of Kosovo, have been blamed for the attack.

It took place near the town of Podujevo in northern Kosovo, 40km (25 miles) north-east of the capital Pristina.

The remote-controlled bomb was detonated 400m from the road at around noon, hitting the first of five buses which had just crossed the border into Kosovo from the city of Nis in Serbia.

'Ethnic cleansing'

Gorica Stjepanovic, 24, who survived the attack with eye injuries, said:

"All of a sudden, everything burst, the bus seemed to have fallen apart.

"Blood was dripping from the roof. When I managed to get out, parts of bodies were everywhere."

The group of Serbs, who moved to Serbia fearing ethnic Albanian attacks, were travelling to the village of Gracanica in Kosovo to visit family graves.

The Orthodox Day of the Dead - 17 February - is when Serbs remember their dead.

The attack has sparked violent protests from the victims' relatives in Gracanica, who have blocked the main road into Pristina and set vehicles on fire.

The convoy was accompanied by five Swedish armoured vehicles which were unaffected.

Leaders of Kosovo's Albanian majority condemned the latest attack and said it was a serious blow to attempts to build peace.

Nato called the killings "premeditated murder".

Its Secretary General George Robertson said: "Nato did not conduct its air campaign in order to see ethnic cleansing by one group replaced by the ethnic attacks and intimidation of another."

The Yugoslav Government also condemned the attack and has declared a day of national mourning for the victims.

Earlier this week United Nations police came under attack in the town of Strpce after a Serbian man died while travelling in a UN convoy.

The Times (UK), May 14, 2002

A very dirty little war

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-7-295526,00.html 

http://www.balkanpeace.org/rs/archive/may02/rs213.shtml 

THE TIMES (UK), Tuesday, May 14, 2002

by Anthony Loyd

The investigation of a bus bomb that killed 11 Serbs was blocked at every turn and the four suspects are now free. Our correspondant reports on the murky world of UN and Nato peacekeeping in Kosovo

February 16, 2001: It was a warm morning with clear skies and the mood of the passengers and accompanying soldiers was relaxed. There were seven coaches in all, each filled with Serb civilians returning from Nis in Serbia to their homes in Kosovo to commemorate zadusnica, one of the Serb Orthodox Church’s three annual days of the dead. Most were refugees who had fled the Yugoslav province to escape retributive killings by Albanians after Nato’s arrival 19 months earlier.

Held at the provincial border between Kosovo and Serbia to have their Ids checked and pick up an escort of Swedish and British troops who were part of the Nato contingent in the province (Kfor), the convoy was en route for Gracanica, a small Serb town in central Kosovo.

Stojan Kostic, 52, was sitting in the front coach as the convoy entered Kosovo. Beside him sat his sister-in-law Planinka. Stojan was dozing, and woke briefly as the vehicle accelerated, before closing his eyes again. At 12 minutes past 11, on a hillside above the road, an Albanian watching the lead vehicle approach the village of Merdare touched the exposed ends of a cable to a battery, just as the coach passed over a culvert.

The bomb blast blew Kostic into the back of the bus and though the floor, which had been opened up. He landed in the luggage compartment, covered in hot engine oil. His nose was cut in half. His ribs and a leg were broken. He put his hand up to his jaw, and two of his teeth fell out.

Planinka, meanwhile, remained stuck in her seat. The explosion had left her almost untouched, but killed all those in front of her, leaving her an immobile witness to the bomb’s immediate aftermath.

"Everyone before me was blown to pieces,"she says. "Before me was twisted metal and light. There was a whole brain in front of me. On either side of the bus I could see bodies missing limbs. The roof was peeled up but hanging down and pieces of people were glued all over it. Just above me someone had been blown halfway through the roof vent. Their legs hung down from the gap."

Eleven Serbs were dead, including Danilo Cokic, a two-year-old boy. Twenty others were injured, eight critically.

PLANTED in the culvert, the bomb was made from 200lbs of TNT and detonated by a command wire that ran for nearly a kilometre to the hillside firing point. It was the most cold-blooded and calculated terrorist strike since Nato entered the province in June, 1999. But it provoked more than just revulsion. To Nato’s critics, the murder of 11 Serbs on a coach sandwiched between Nato armoured vehicles seemed to epitomise the organisation’s inability to control Albanian extremists, to protect the Serbs or to hold the moral high ground in their justification of the war.

And for the British there was a sense of culpability in the bombing. Since November, 2000, Nato intelligence sources had warned of the possibility of an Albanian attack on the road, which lay in the British sector, specifying the threat of a culvert bomb. Yet, on the day of the attack, a flawed route-check by British troops that left two culverts unchecked, faulty communications and ill-fortune all conspired to produce catastophe.

The UN and Nato knew that, with so much of their credibilty in Kosovo at stake, there was still a chance to save face and regain some lost initiative, and it lay with the successful capture and prosecution of those responsible for the bombing.

THE pounding on the door of his Pristina apartment roused Cele Gashi from sleep. Bleary-eyed, he stumbled from the bed and clipped a pistol belt to his waist. It was 4.30pm on March 19. Gashi had just finished a 12-hour duty shift at his TMK barracks in Pristina, where he served with the rank of colonel.

The TMK, an acronym that translates as Kosovo Protection Corps, was created in the summer of 1999 under the aegis of Nato and the UN after the Serb withdrawal from Kosovo. Its 5,000 members are all former KLA fighters. Funded by, among others, the EU and the US State Department, the TMK is styled as a "civil emergency" unit. Its members are given a variety of training to this end by organisations including the British and French armies. Top commanders, their bodyguards and sentries are allowed to carry weapons, and on duty all wear berets and uniform; whatever their role, they look like a militia and they think they are Kosovo’s future army.

Though Nato and the UN technically control its membership, since its creation the TMK has been as contentious as its KLA parent. Some senior UN officials regard it as a monster. Frequently implicated in the murder and intimidation of Serb civilians, organised crime and cross-border insurgencies into rump-Serbia and Macedonia, the TMK nevertheless survives as the recipient of foreign funding and training.

Opening the door, Gashi saw a group of men in British uniform standing in the corridor. "They didn’t say anything," he remembers. "Without a word they leapt upon me, threw me on the ground and handcuffed my arms behind my back."

Gashi was hooded, driven away, and eventually removed from the vehicle and frogmarched into a small room. "There they removed the hood from me. I was standing on a small wooden pallet. In front of me were three armed men pointing their guns at me, and a woman. All were in uniform. The woman spoke bad Albanian. She said to me, ‘If you try anything these men will kill you’."

Gashi had just been arrested by British special forces in connection with the Nis bus bombing. He says he spent the next 12 hours standing on the wooden pallet being questioned about the attack, and was allowed to sit down for only 20 minutes when he became faint, before being handed over to a UN detention facility the next day. Gashi admitted nothing. He was a tough man. As a former guerrilla, he had been an intelligence officer for KLA in the Llap zone, the most northern of seven KLA operational zones that divided Kosovo.

Two other former Llap KLA fighters were arrested that day by specialist British units: Avdi Behluli and Jusuf Veliu, the latter a TMK captain at the time of his detention. An intensive military intelligence operation, using a panoply of Nato resources, pointed a finger at these men for having been part of a nine-strong active service unit that planned and carried out the bomb attack.

A fourth suspect was detained that night by British soldiers. Unlike the others, Florim Ejupi had no military experience. He was a smalltime, unsophisticated Kosovar Albanian criminal who had lived in Germany for the duration of the war. He had served four sentences in German prisons for drug dealing, attempted manslaughter, burglary and assault while the fighting was at its height. Yet from the start he appeared to be the key to the investigation. It seemed that Ejupi’s crude crime profile and inexperience had led him to make a mistake. Of the four prisoners, he was the only one to be connected to the scene of the crime by physical evidence as opposed to intelligence information. A cigarette butt found at the bomb’s hilltop firing point, along with scraps of cable wrapping paper, bore his DNA trace, which was cross-checked for confirmation against his DNA print on German police files.

However, in spite of his arrest, the UNMIK regional serious crime squad responsible for the investigation was already in difficulties, and whispers of a conspiracy were beginning to shadow the case.

At the site of the explosion on the day the bomb went off, Detective Stu Kellock, the squad’s Canadian chief, had asked that UNMIK put a dedicated task force together to work on the investigation, as would have been done in any western country. That request and subsequent ones were ignored.

"It was obvious right from the start that there were other agendas going on that the police didn’t know about," Kellock says. "Technically we were in charge of the investigation but it never seemed that way. Intelligence about the suspects was denied to us. Information was withheld by Kfor. We were always the last to be told what was going on. From the word go, I got a very sinister feeling about the whole thing."

The police claim that as soon as the four suspects were transferred to UNMIK detention centres in Kosovo, some 12 hours after their initial arrest by the British, a UN order restricted police interviews of the men. Indeed, Kellock never personally managed to get access to a single interview with the prisoners.

Another Canadian serious crimes officer, Joe McAllister, recalls: "We were told, ‘These are the suspects " question them’. Yet we had no information upon which to base our questioning, nor any direction, and anyway we couldn’t get proper access to the prisoners." By early May the suspects were no longer in UNMIK custody, and the conspiracy theories were about to become legend.

Apparently haunted by the possibility of the suspects’ escaping, the UN ordered their transfer to the most secure detention area in the province: the jail inside the American base at Camp Bondsteel. The camp was home to more than 5,000 US soldiers; in its detention facility, suspects languished in Guantanamo Bay-style fluorescent orange suits, surrounded by concertina rolls of razor wire, floodlights and watchtowers.

The suspects were transferred to Bondsteel on May 3. But a year ago, on the night of May 14, Florim Ejupi, the most unsophisticated suspect and the one man against whom physical evidence existed, "disappeared" from the camp.

ACCORDING to Cele Gashi, the four suspects had been kept together in a central holding area in Bondsteel "a move that allowed the prisoners free association and itself stymied evidence procedures. Late in the evening of May 14, Gashi, Behluli and Veliu drifted off to sleep while Ejupi remained awake, listening to a radio. The next thing Gashi says he remembers is American soldiers bursting into the compound shortly after 4am. Ejupi was gone, and his transistor radio lay on his empty bed.

The Americans later said that he had escaped using a pair of wire cutters hidden in a spinach pie sent to the prison by his family. They say crucial floodlights were faulty, and there are claims that an inexperienced National Guard unit had left a stretch of perimeter wire unobserved for 100 minutes.

Soon, though, outraged UNMIK police officers were offering a different story. They claim that from the moment the four suspects were transferred to camp Bondsteel, interview access, already difficult, was further obstructed by the Americans.

Some officers go on to claim that Ejupi had been a source for US intelligence. They believe that Ejupi was released from Bondsteel either because US intelligence agencies did not wish to be implicated by association in the bombing of the Nis Express, or because they wanted to establish the identities of the men who authorised the bomb attack to use for their own ends. Both escape and conspiracy theories challenge belief. "It’s not clear cut either way," one senior UNMIK official admits. "We really don’t know what happened with Ejupi. It is possible that he was released, but if that was the case then it was the act of an agency operating without State Department or Pentagon approval. In the big picture the Americans had far more to lose than to gain from the ‘disappearance’, however it happened."

WHATEVER the real truth, news of Ejupi’s flight further crushed morale among the police investigators. Kellock says: "I would use the word ‘devastating’. It called into question the whole reason why we were in Kosovo, and any questions we had concerning Ejupi’s escape remain to this day unanswered. From that moment on, the writing was on the wall for our investigation."

Though three suspects, Gashi, Behluli and Veliu, remained in custody, this was of scant consolation to the police. They say that they had no wiretaps or covert surveillance to monitor associates of the prisoners. Witnesses were afraid to come forward from a society that has traditionally been impenetrable for law enforcers. Nato continued to withold its intelligence. And human rights groups in the UN and OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) ensured that the suspects’ rights were so rigorously upheld that the few police interviews conducted were heavily restricted.

The investigation was already being scaled down. In the absence of a dedicated taskforce, the 18-strong serious crimes squad was having to divert its resources to other crimes. By midsummer there were only three detectives still involved with the case. And a high turnover of UN personnel meant that few of the original investigators remained.

McAllister took over the job of lead investigator in June, but was removed from the post by the UN in August for speaking to a journalist about his frustrations. After his departure the file on the Nis Express became the responsibility of a single detective, and the investigation all but ceased.

Paradoxically, this was the one time when the UN should have poured resources into spreading the scope of the investigation. The presence of the remaining three suspects in custody was becoming a legal embarrassment. Their continued detention was the result of an Executive Hold order by Hans Haekkerup, the senior UN administrator in Kosovo; this was a special circumstances option that allowed for an extra-judicial detention, but was increasingly coming under criticism by human rights groups.

In the autumn, UNMIK created a Detention Review Commission of three international judges to examine the case, validate (if appropriate) Haekkerup’s Executive Hold order and return the suspects’ detention to a judicial framework.

The three judges were given access to the Nato intelligence that lay behind the arrests. In September, 2001, they decided that the intelligence was compelling enough to allow for the suspects’ continued detention of 90 days before the case went to Kosovo’s Supreme Court.

The onus, therefore, was on the police to produce more evidence to put before the Supreme Court. Yet their investigation was already dead in the water and no attempt was made to revive it. The 90 days expired and, on December 18 last year, the case went before the Supreme Court. This body was not given access to Nato’s intelligence files, and in the absence of any fresh evidence, it recommended the immediate release of the three suspects.

ANY remaining trust held by Kosovo’s Serbs in UNMIK, Kfor or justice in the province disintegrated after the men were set free. The trio, still terrorist suspects in an unclosed case, were given local heroes’ welcomes after they left jail. Cele Gashi and Jusuf Veliu were embraced publicly by senior TMK officers. In January, Gashi returned to his position as a TMK colonel in Pristina; Veliu was reinstated as a TMK captain. Nato officials in Kosovo denied that this move had been officially sanctioned. Yet six weeks later both men were in barracks and in uniform.

In UNMIK there is confusion as to whether Gashi and Veliu were ever even suspended from the TMK in the first place, some officials even suggesting that the suspects were being paid out of a UN-regulated budget during their time in custody.

As for Florim Ejupi, he remains "missing"; after a year, the mystery surrounding his escape remains undiminished.

What the acronyms mean

KLA: Kosovo Liberation Army. Albanian resistance organisation, now undergoing demilitarisation.

TMK: Kosovo Protection Corps, created in 1999 under the aegis of Nato and the UN after Serb withdrawl from Kosovo. Its 5,000 members are all former KLA fighters.

Kfor: The Nato-led international peacekeeping force in Kosovo.

UNMIK: United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo: a civilian law enforcement unit.

UNMIK Police Press release
Pristina, June 9, 2004