Milosevic: Smugglers to blame for bodies in Danube

Slobodan Milosevic told the UN war crimes tribunal yesterday that ethnic Albanians whose bodies were packed into a freezer lorry and dumped in the Danube were victims of human traffickers, not Serbian troops.

"We are talking here about an organised criminal group. People had drowned when the lorry toppled and ended up in the river," said the former Yugoslav president, who is conducting his own defence.

He made the comments during his cross-examination of Dragan Karleusa, a police captain who gave evidence on the investigation last year into the discovery of the bodies of 86 Kosovo Albanians driven into the Danube three years ago.

The corpses were later retrieved and police suspect they were reburied at a police training base near Belgrade, in what prosecutors contend was an attempt to conceal evidence of war crimes.

Mr Milosevic quoted several state security reports about widespread human smuggling in the region in eastern Serbia where the lorry was discovered in 1999.

Mr Milosevic is charged with 66 counts of war crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo. He claimed the "refrigerator-truck case was invented to create a climate" for his extradition to the war crimes court in The Hague last year.

Bosko Radojkovic, a policeman who handled the lorry when it surfaced in the Danube in April 1999, testified that his superiors had ordered the corpses be removed from the lorry and the vehicle be destroyed.

Mr Radojkovic said police technicians had extracted 86 corpses who "suffered different injuries from sharp and blunt objects". Among the victims were two children, he said.