[STOPNATO] Report Casts Doubt On Racak Massacre Claim Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - rrozoff@webtv.net (Rick Rozoff) STOP NATO: NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.HOME-PAGE.ORG Press report casts doubt on Kosovo massacre claim Saturday, 15-Apr-2000 Copyright 2000 by Agence France-Presse ROME, April 15 (AFP) - The Italian daily newspaper Il Manifesto on Saturday said that a group of ethnic Albanians, found slain in Kosovo in a suspected massacre of unarmed civilians by Serb forces last year, had not been executed. The Manifesto report, based on the "copies of protocols of 40 post-mortems" performed by Serbian and Finnish experts, revived a more than one-year controversy over what really happened in the Kosovo town of Racak. "There is evidence that this was not an execution and it is not sure that these were unarmed civilians," said the left-wing paper. William Walker, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) chief, said after the discovery of the 45 bodies, allegedly killed by Serbian forces, that the massacre was a crime against humanity. Belgrade said the dead were members of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) killed in combat. Il Manifesto said 37 of the 40 bodies which had been autopsied showed traces of gunpowder on their hands which would back up the claim that their were rebels. However, official documents released after the post-mortems did not mention these findings, the paper added. Only one body, identified as Ra-34, was said to have carried signs that he was shot at "relatively close range", while the 39 other post-mortems did not back up "the theory of a mass execution." The paper also asked why the Serbian press center in Pristina would have organized a trip by foreign correspondents to Rajak, which is 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Kosovo's main city, on the very day the alleged massacre by Serb forces was being carried out. "The Racak incident was used to prepare public opinion for a military escalation, to provide a moral justification for the war" by NATO forces after March 24, 1999, the paper argued, speaking of a "disinformation campaign". A year after the January 15, 1999, incident, Finnish chief expert Helena Ranta said post-mortems had come very close to the truth, even though nobody would ever know what really happened in Rajak. Kosovo peacekeepers intercept major arms stash Saturday, 15-Apr-2000 Copyright 2000 by Agence France-Presse PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, April 15 (AFP) - Peacekeepers intercepted a major stash of weapons being shipped through the southeast of Kosovo, including 77 anti-tank mines, a spokesman for the NATO-led KFOR force said Saturday. Austrian troops found the weapons, which also included more than 1000 rounds of ammunition, three rifles, 40 grenades and a machine gun in a truck on the road between Gnjilane to Gracancia, a Serb enclave on the southern edge of Pristina. The truck was stopped on Friday at a vehicle checkpoint and its two ethnic Albanian drivers were detained at the US military base of Camp Bondsteel, Major Frank Benjaminsen said. In the south of US-led eastern sector, villagers from Isufova Mala also handed over 25 anti-personnel mines they had collected, together with five anti-tank mines and five sticks of explosives. No arrests were made as the villagers surrendered the explosives voluntarily, Benjaminsen said. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nyteeu-04.17.00-12:29:02-15232