The Kosovo Prosecutor’s Office announced Friday the arrest of a former Kosovar policeman on suspicion of committing war crimes during the conflict between Kosovar Albanian rebels and the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, known as the Kosovo war, between 1998 and 1999.
The Kosovar Prosecutor’s Office only identifies the detained former policeman by his initials S.T., but Serbian media and relatives had reported in the last hours the arrest, on Thursday, of a former officer named Sladan Trajkovic, whose wife confirmed that he had been handed over to the Kosovar authorities precisely for war crimes.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, «S.T.» is suspected, in cooperation with other persons, of «murder, torture and robbery», as well as of instigating forced displacements of civilians as a member of the former Yugoslav Federal Army during its deployment in the town of Reznik in April 1999, two months before the end of the conflict, reports Kosovo Press.
The former policeman is now in the custody of the Kosovar authorities, in the midst of one of the worst moments of tension in recent months between Pristina and Belgrade.
Trajkovic, according to Serbian media, was one of the 570 Kosovo Serb policemen who left their posts in November, in the midst of the institutional boycott declared by the Serbian List party against the Kosovar government.
Serbian and Kosovar media have also reported the arrest of two other former Kosovo Serb policemen, identified as Dejan Pantic and Zoran Mihajlovic, the latter this afternoon, as confirmed by the Kosovo Online portal.
Pantic was arrested on December 9 at the Jarinje border crossing on charges of «organizing the execution of a terrorist act» and will remain in prison for at least one month. The reasons for Mihajlovic’s arrest are not known at the moment.
The arrests of the former Kosovo Serb policemen provoked last week the uprising in barricades of the population of northern Kosovo, of Serb majority and now in the middle of an institutional vacuum, which forced the Kosovo Police to assume temporary control of the border crossings with Serbia.
All this, in a crisis that has been escalating until the request made this Friday by Serbia for NATO to allow the deployment of Belgrade’s security forces in Kosovo, an unprecedented request since the end of the conflict.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
