Serb war crime link to mass grave

Milosevic has been indicted for war crimes

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Serbian police have begun exhuming bodies from a mass grave that could link ousted leader Slobodan Milosevic to war crimes.

The bodies were recovered two years ago from a refrigerated truck dumped in the Danube.

Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic told Belgrade radio they were being exhumed from a mass grave, but did not identify its location. He also suggested there might be more such graves.

"It is now apparent that these mass graves contain more bodies than those found in the truck lifted from the bottom of the Danube," he told the radio.

He gave a figure of 86 bodies. The number of corpses recovered by divers from the truck has been reported to be 50, Reuters news agency said.

The recovery of the truck filled with bodies was hushed up by the authorities then serving under Milosevic and the story only emerged in April this year through a local newspaper.

The bodies were pulled out of the truck on April 6, 1999, about two weeks into NATO's air war against Yugoslavia to halt Belgrade's repression in Kosovo.

Divers who recovered them were reported to have said they included many women, children and elderly men.

They were reported to have been driven off in trucks, but their whereabouts were unknown.

Last month, Serbia's authorities accused Milosevic and close aides of covering up evidence of possible war crimes against civilians during military operations in Kosovo in 1998-99.

They said they arrived at their conclusions during investigations into the "bodies in the river" case.

Milosevic has been indicted by the United Nations tribunal in the Hague, along with four of his top aides, for war crimes.

Mihajlovic said on Sunday that veils worn by some of the women suggested that the victims came from Kosovo, whose population is predominantly Muslim.

Last month a senior Serbian police official told a news conference that Milosevic had ordered his then interior minister, following a series of bloody clashes in Kosovo between his forces and ethnic Albanian separatist guerrillas, "to remove civilian casualties that could be the subject of potential investigations by the Hague tribunal."

Yugoslavia's new leadership has not ruled out handing Milosevic to the Hague, but want to try him first at home for alleged corruption and abuse of power.

Talks between the two partners in the Yugoslav federal government on a new law that could enable Milosevic to be extradited -- currently banned by the constitution -- have been blocked by opposition from the junior coalition partner.

The talks were due to resume later on Sunday in Belgrade.

Belgrade is under strong pressure from the West to cooperate with the Hague, with an international donors' conference due at the end of this month and threats by the U.S. that it might withhold aid unless Yugoslavia hands over Milosevic.