HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------[This would be laughable if it wasn't so pathetic and sad. After years of lies this is all the NATOites can produce as "evidence" of Milosevic's war guilt. Ridiculous. PS the 300 exumed Kosovo Albanians - an inflated number in and of itself - didn't match the composition of the "bodies discovered in the truck" b/c all those exhumed were KLA fighters! There is no evidence that anything was in this truck, not even the "photos" produced as evidence. Apparently this man took an entire roll of film to photograph the dead but somehow forgot to take snapshots of the corpses! One more point: of the 3,7500 missing by the Red Cross 1,300 have disapeared since NATO entered the province and are overwhelmingly civilian non-Albanians, while the other 2,400 are mostly Albanian men of military age...hmmmm.....]
Friday, 25 January, 2002, 16:43 GMT
Milosevic exposed
Mr Milosevic's trial on charges relating to Kosovo is due to open on the 12 February 2002.
When Slobodan Milosevic waved goodbye to Serbia on the 28 June 2001 his final words were "farewell brother Serbs". It is ironic that Milosevic could be convicted on the evidence of his own brother Serbs - those he thought he could trust - and not on the word of an Albanian Kosovar. Nancy Durham reports.
Bosko Radojkovic, Serb murder detective
One of the keys to the conviction of Milosevic could be Bosko Radojkovic, a Serbian murder detective, who put himself in grave danger by disobeying orders long before the former president fell. Radojkovic is the paradigm beat cop, based in Kladovo in eastern Serbia. He visits scenes of crimes and takes and develops his own photographs. Little did he realise his negatives would provide damning evidence in the war crimes case against the former president of Yugoslavia.
Discovering the bodies
On the 6 April 1999 Radojkovic was called in to check reports of a very large white box in the Danube. It turned out to be a Mercedes freezer truck.
Resurrecting the truck in the Danube River
The local police diver determined that no one was inside the cab, but he could see a rock had been placed against the accelerator so this was no accident. Still it was no cause for great alarm; the Danube is often used as a dumping ground. As the truck was pulled to the riverbank Bosko took pictures, neatly framing each shot of the truck the closer it got. The sequence is fascinating in its ordinariness: tidy shots in black and white of a truck in water, coming closer.
The Kosovo connection
First you see only the white rectangle in water, half submerged. Next you can also see the cab. By the third shot the name on the driver's door is visible: Prizren, a city in Kosovo 240 kilometres (150 miles) away, and the name of the business, Pik Progres, a slaughterhouse. When Radojkovic made the Kosovo connection the event became more unusual for him, because at the time Nato was at war with Serbia over its actions in Kosovo. Very close now and the crack in one of the rear doors is quite noticeable. Something can be seen hanging out the bottom of the doors.
Limbs hang out of the cracked door of the truck
This is Radojkovic's last photograph. Straining to study the picture it is difficult to decide whether the limb is an arm or a leg. It looks like a leg, but the limb is so stretched, elongated, lean and limp that sometimes you change your mind and decide it is an arm. There are no known photographs to provide the full details of what was inside that truck, but Radojkovic saw it all.
Hiding the bodies
He and a team of local workers were ordered by senior police officials, acting on orders from Belgrade, to clean up the mess. This meant unloading the bodies of 86 men, women and children from the truck.
Radojkovic's assignments were to destroy the truck and his roll of negatives. The men worked through the following two nights by torchlight, carrying bodies and body parts. Radojkovic believes their injuries were caused by blows from tools such as axes or hammers. The corpses were then taken on a three-hour ride to Batanjica on the edge of Belgrade, where they were buried inside a high security police compound.
Rediscovering the evidence
Last summer 300 bodies of Kosovar Albanians were exhumed at this site though they are not thought to include the Danube bodies. No group matching their number, sex, and age has been found. In spring, when the digging resumes investigators expect to unearth hundreds more.
I had to do it. It was war
Bosko Radojkovic
The night the dead were moved to Batanjica, Detective Radojkovic accompanied the freezer truck to a handier police site near Kladovo where, doing as he was told, he blew it up. Radojkovic grins with mild embarrassment at what he did. He knows his job is to preserve evidence but he says, "I had to do it. It was war." He kept the negatives in his desk drawer for more than two years, until May 2001 when Serbian Ministry of Interior officials paid him a visit. By then Slobodan Milosevic was in jail in Belgrade and the new government had decided it was time to go public with the Danube truck story. Radojkovic's pictures are the only tangible evidence that there even was a truck full of bodies in the river, but he is modest, even critical of the job he did. "I regret that I didn't take photographs of their faces. It is especially the faces that stay in my memory."
Identifying the dead
It is the faces of two children in particular who stick. Radojkovic has pored over the Red Cross missing persons book for Kosovo to try to identify them. In all there are 3,786 persons still missing as a result of the conflict.
Searching the Red Cross missing persons book for Kosovo
Radojkovic guesses that the people in the truck had been dead for two weeks at the most. That knowledge, and his own estimate of the children's ages has enabled him to point to three-year old Emir Gashi and his eight year old sister Natyra, last seen alive at their home in Trnje, near Suva Reka, in the heart of Kosovo on 25 March 1999. By Radojkovic's reckoning, there are no two children even close to these ages missing around that time.
Families grieve
In Trnje today, the Gashi family is trying to rebuild. The children's uncle, Bekim Gashi, survived the slaughter which took place there on the day the children were last seen.
Bekim Gashi, the uncle of the missing children
He lost his niece and nephew, and his mother and four sisters. He says that in early morning the villagers saw Serbian forces approaching so the women, fearing their men would be targets, urged them to run and hide. They did, and the women and children were killed. The following day, Gashi says, Serbs took away 18 bodies, Emir and Natyra among them. Were they following the same sort of clean up orders Radojkovic and his colleagues would be called upon to do two weeks hence? The Gashi survivors are desperate to get their bodies home for proper burial. As Bekim Gashi says: "At least we'll have a place to mourn."
Exposed: Sunday 27th January 2002 at 1915 on BBC Two
Reporter: Nancy Durham
Producer: Guy Smith
Deputy Editor: Farah Durrani
Editor: Fiona Murch
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See also:
15 Nov 01 | Crossing Continents
The Serbian tragedy
22 Jun 01 | Correspondent
Allies and lies
21 Jan 02 | Europe
DNA clues to Bosnia's missing
01 Jun 01 | Correspondent
Nato's children in Kosovo
14 Oct 00 | Correspondent
March to revolution
13 Oct 00 | Correspondent
Lessons from history
04 Aug 00 | Correspondent
The final battle of Yugoslavia
05 Aug 99 | Europe
Croatia's legacy of war
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