Kosovo Atrocities
NATO troops closely guarding Kosovar refugees hurrying back to their homes Thursday are finding more and more evidence of mass executions and even torture, reports CBS News Correspondent Kimberly Dozier.
Foreign Office Minister Geoff Hoon said NATO fears Serb soldiers and special police may have killed 10,000 of Kosovo's Albanian majority in more than 100 massacres as part of their campaign to ethnically cleanse the province.
U.N. war crimes investigators are studying what appears to be a Serb-run torture center in the Kosovo capital of Pristina, the British Foreign Office said Thursday.
Briefing reporters, Hoon said British paratroopers have sealed off a five-story concrete building that was the headquarters of departing Serb military police in Pristina, where torture is reported to have taken place.
"We have found what we believe is strong evidence of the systematic torture of prisoners by (Yugoslav President Slobodan) Milosevic's police in this cellar," British military spokesman Colonel Nick Clissitt told reporters.
Dossiers, including photographs of prisoners, littered the cellar and ground floor of the building. They included line-up photographs of women and teen-age boys, some in the uniform of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
Hoon said British forces have found knives, rubber and wooden batons, baseball bats "with Serb slogans carved into them," a wooden crate full of brass knuckles, and "savage pornography and drugs, presumably used to sedate victims."
The most chilling aspect, said Hoon, is that the building "does not appear to have been a special holding center for the Serbs' victims. It seems to have been just an ordinary police headquarters."
Hoon said that outside the building "there is a trail of charred paper leading to an incinerator," apparently indicating that the Serbs tried to burn evidence of their alleged crimes.
The spokesman said British troops had found evidence of "inhuman cruelty" every day since they entered Kosovo last Saturday as part of NATO forces clearing the way for refugees to return home as Serb forces pull out.
In Washington, Navy Capt. Mike Doubleday said NATO peacekeepers had come upon or heard about 90 suspected mass grave sites since entering Kosovo Saturday.
Villagers in Vlastica, southeast of Pristina, told soldiers about a grave containing the bodies of 13 people they said were killed on April 30.
They showed two graves hidden in the woods where they had buried groups of 13 and nine dead, and pointed to two more such sites where they said seven and three bodies were buried.
"There were soldiers all over and shelling all the time," said one man, who said he had escaped death by minutes after his brother told him to get away. He declined to give his name because he had been a prisoner of the Serbs until just two days ago.
The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal will send its first team of investigators into Kosov on Friday.
Investigators will focus on mapping and photographing alleged war crimes sites. As many as 300 experts could be sent to the region in coming weeks to ensure that it gathers all the evidence it needs before winter sets in.