Serbia To Check Possible Kosovo Mass Grave Site

Serbia plans to investigate a possible mass grave near Kosovo, believed to contain Albanian victims of the 1998-99 war and potentially fresh evidence of Serb atrocities as the province presses for independence.

The office of the Serbian war crimes prosecutor said authorities would begin digging at the site near the town of Raska on June 5. Serbian media reports located the grave at an abandoned quarry in the village of Rudnica on the U.N.-controlled boundary line between Kosovo and Serbia.

"We have indications that there is a mass grave in the Raska area," said Bruno Vekaric, spokesman for the war crimes prosecutor. "We suspect they are Albanian victims."

The remains of more than 800 ethnic Albanians were found in 2001 in mass graves in eastern Serbia and on a police compound near the capital Belgrade in 2001. They were killed in Kosovo and trucked north to conceal evidence of atrocities as NATO bombed to wrest control of the territory from late Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Officials from Kosovo will attend the investigation in June, the head of Kosovo's missing persons commission, Arif Mucolli, told Reuters.

"Some witnesses saw a vehicle unload something at that spot," said an unnamed official in the Serbian war crimes court, quoted in Belgrade weekly Vreme. "We will know very soon whether it was earth from a road being built nearby or bodies."

The province of 2 million people -- 90 percent Albanian -- has been run by the United Nations since 1999, when NATO drove out Serb forces accused of slaughtering and expelling Albanians in a two-year war with separatist guerrillas.

Ten thousand Albanians died and almost one million took temporary refuge in Albania, Montenegro and Macedonia. Just over 2,000 people are still missing, the majority Albanians.

The West wants to give Kosovo independence by the summer, under a plan drafted by U.N. mediator Martti Ahtisaari after 13 months of fruitless Serb-Albanian talks. Western powers behind the 1999 NATO air war see no prospect of forcing Kosovo's Albanian majority back into the arms of Belgrade.

The United States says it will draft a U.N. Security Council resolution this month, but veto holder Russia continues to back Belgrade's insistence that Kosovo must remain part of Serbia.