Serbia to try war crime suspects

A mass grave found earlier this month at a police compound in the Belgrade suburb of Batajnica

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Serbs will begin to go on trial in their own country for alleged war crimes next week, reports have said.

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was sent to the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague last month under intense pressure from the West.

But Serbia's Justice Minister Vladan Batic announced on Saturday a schedule for trials to take place within the country's own borders, Belgrade independent radio station B-92 and Beta news agency said.

No names or trial details were given, but B-92 quoted Batic as saying he would ask The Hague to allow Yugoslavia to try cases in relation to Milosevic.

Four others indicted are former interior minister Vlajko Stojiljkovic; retired head of the army Dragoljub Ojdanic; Nikola Sainovic, a senior official in Milosevic's Socialist Party; and Serbia's current president Milan Milutinovic.

Batic is also reported to have said that tribunal investigators will question 58 Serbs next month about alleged crimes committed by ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army separatists, with indictments expected to follow.

The announcements coincide with the government saying it would soon begin exhuming a fourth mass grave, which is presumed to hold the remains of at least 50 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo killed in 1999.

The bodies were discovered in a freezer lorry in 1999 in the Perucac lake in western Serbia, the government's Web site Serbia Info said.

The find was allegedly hushed up by Milosevic's administration, it added.

It is the second case of a freezer lorry full of bodies to have been discovered in the past few months, while 110 bodies have been uncovered in the three mass graves so far.