Posted on 02/18/2003 8:40:12 PM PST by Destro
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
British troops hunt down former KLA men
By Christian Jennings
PRISTINA: British troops have spearheaded a NATO-led operation to arrest Kosova Albanians indicted with war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague, according to intelligence officials.
Three Albanians were in NATO detention in Kosovo yesterday awaiting transfer to prison cells in the Hague. Yet within hours of the operation beginning, it transpired that the arresting troops had missed their main target, a former Albanian rebel leader turned politician named Fatmir Limaj.
The operation, which began before dawn on the freezing winter streets of the regional capital Pristina, was the first time that ethnic Albanians from the province have been arrested on behalf of the tribunal. Troops from the 1st Battalion, the Staffordshire Regiment, based in Pristina, as well as British Army intelligence and reconnaissance teams, swooped on three Albanian suspects around 3am.
NATO would not specify or clarify whether special forces teams from Britain’s 22 Special Air Service regiment, had been used in the arrest operation. The whereabouts of Fatmir Limaj remained unclear as the operation continued into the evening yesterday.
Both NATO and the UN administration in Kosovo refused to confirm any details of the ongoing operation, although international intelligence and security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the hunt for Mr Limaj was continuing.
Officials from the Hague tribunal also refused to confirm details of the ongoing operation.
Fatmir Limaj is believed to have been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for killings, torture and illegal detentions of both fellow ethnic Albanians and Serbs between 1998-9.
Mr Limaj, 32, is a former member of the general staff of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the ethnic Albanian rebel force that battled Serb troops and policemen of former President Slobodan Milosevic between 1997-1999.
After the UN and NATO entered Kosovo in June 1999, putting the Serbs to flight, Limaj discarded his camouflage fatigues for a politician’s suit.
He became the vice-chairman and parliamentary whip for the Democratic Party of Kosovo, the main Albanian party that sprung out of the ranks of the KLA.
One of those arrested was Haradin Bala, picked up in the village of Koretica, 15 miles outside Pristina. His relatives said that at 3am yesterday morning, four vehicles containing armed men in balaclavas drew up outside the house. They arrested him, took his photograph and removed him.
British soldiers, Italian carabinieri and Norwegian NATO troops then carried out a search of the house until 11am, explaining that Bala had been arrested for war-crimes. The KLA was trained, financed, supplied and assisted by American and British intelligence and special forces assets in their fight against the Serbs.
Yet after June 1999, NATO and the UN’s soldiers and administrators rapidly lost patience and sympathy with their former rebel proteges, as hardline extremist Kosova Albanians carried out a hugely violent campaign of reverse ethnic cleansing against Kosovo’s minority Serb population. By March 2000, Carla del Ponte, the Hague Tribunal’s Chief Prosecutor, announced that she had a number of ethnic Kosova Albanians in her sights.
Initially British and American intelligence agencies were opposed to the arrests of the men they had once trained and helped, but by summer 2002 pressure was mounting for NATO to bring some Kosova Albanian war-criminal scalps to the Tribunal. —Scotsman
Clinton, Blair and their cronies are responsible and are a criminals for helping Islamic terrorists.
By summer of 2002!!
The war in Macedonia lasted from February 2001 until September 2001. During that time KLA units were crossing in and out of Kosovo attacking Macedonian troops and police while NATO was looking on.
Who is once again guilty of war crimes?
"Reverse ethnic cleansing"?! The only ethnic cleansing before and after NATO intervention was Albanians driving Serbs (and Gypsies and others) out of their ancestral land. The only difference is that before NATO/KLA takover, Serbian police tried to stop this process. Now Serbs will be eradicated completely and Kosovo will be Serbfrei for Muslims.
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