Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Visto che si parla di bombe su autobus...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-7-295526,00.html
 May 14, 2002
Reportage
A very dirty little war
by Anthony Loyd 
The investigation of a bus bomb that killed 11 Serbs was blocked at
every turn and the four suspects are now free. Our correspondant
reports on the murky world of UN and Nato peacekeeping in Kosovo
 
 
 
February 16, 2001: It was a warm morning with clear skies and the mood
of the passengers and accompanying soldiers was relaxed. There were
seven coaches in all, each filled with Serb civilians returning from
Nis in Serbia to their homes in Kosovo to commemorate zadusnica, one
of the Serb Orthodox Church&#8217;s three annual days of the dead.
Most were refugees who had fled the Yugoslav province to escape
retributive killings by Albanians after Nato&#8217;s arrival 19 months
earlier.
Held at the provincial border between Kosovo and Serbia to have their
IDs checked and pick up an escort of Swedish and British troops who
were part of the Nato contingent in the province (Kfor), the convoy
was en route for Gracanica, a small Serb town in central Kosovo.
Stojan Kostic, 52, was sitting in the front coach as the convoy
entered Kosovo. Beside him sat his sister-in-law Planinka. Stojan was
dozing, and woke briefly as the vehicle accelerated, before closing
his eyes again. At 12 minutes past 11, on a hillside above the road,
an Albanian watching the lead vehicle approach the village of Merdare
touched the exposed ends of a cable to a battery, just as the coach
passed over a culvert.
The bomb blast blew Kostic into the back of the bus and though the
floor, which had been opened up. He landed in the luggage compartment,
covered in hot engine oil. His nose was cut in half. His ribs and a
leg were broken. He put his hand up to his jaw, and two of his teeth
fell out.
Planinka, meanwhile, remained stuck in her seat. The explosion had
left her almost untouched, but killed all those in front of her,
leaving her an immobile witness to the bomb&#8217;s immediate
aftermath.
&#8220;Everyone before me was blown to pieces,&#8221; she says.
&#8220;Before me was twisted metal and light. There was a whole brain
in front of me. On either side of the bus I could see bodies missing
limbs. The roof was peeled up but hanging down and pieces of people
were glued all over it. Just above me someone had been blown halfway
through the roof vent. Their legs hung down from the gap.&#8221;
Eleven Serbs were dead, including Danilo Cokic, a two-year-old boy.
Twenty others were injured, eight critically.
PLANTED in the culvert, the bomb was made from 200lbs of TNT and
detonated by a command wire that ran for nearly a kilometre to the
hillside firing point.It was the most cold-blooded and calculated
terrorist strike since Nato entered the province in June, 1999. But it
provoked more than just revulsion. To Nato&#8217;s critics, the murder
of 11 Serbs on a coach sandwiched between Nato armoured vehicles
seemed to epitomise the organisation&#8217;s inability to control
Albanian extremists, to protect the Serbs or to hold the moral high
ground in their justification of the war.
And for the British there was a sense of culpability in the bombing.
Since November, 2000, Nato intelligence sources had warned of the
possibility of an Albanian attack on the road, which lay in the
British sector, specifying the threat of a culvert bomb. Yet, on the
day of the attack, a flawed route-check by British troops that left
two culverts unchecked, faulty communications and ill-fortune all
conspired to produce catastophe.
The UN and Nato knew that, with so much of their credibilty in Kosovo
at stake, there was still a chance to save face and regain some lost
initiative, and it lay with the successful capture and prosecution of
those responsible for the bombing.
THE pounding on the door of his Pristina apartment roused Cele Gashi
from sleep. Bleary-eyed, he stumbled from the bed and clipped a pistol
belt to his waist. It was 4.30pm on March 19. Gashi had just finished
a 12-hour duty shift at his TMK barracks in Pristina, where he served
with the rank of colonel.
The TMK, an acronym that translates as Kosovo Protection Corps, was
created in the summer of 1999 under the aegis of Nato and the UN after
the Serb withdrawal from Kosovo. Its 5,000 members are all former KLA
fighters. Funded by, among others, the EU and the US State Department,
the TMK is styled as a &#8220;civil emergency&#8221; unit. Its members
are given a variety of training to this end by organisations including
the British and French armies. Top commanders, their bodyguards and
sentries are allowed to carry weapons, and on duty all wear berets and
uniform; whatever their role, they look like a militia and they think
they are Kosovo&#8217;s future army.
Though Nato and the UN technically control its membership, since its
creation the TMK has been as contentious as its KLA parent. Some
senior UN officials regard it as a monster. Frequently implicated in
the murder and intimidation of Serb civilians, organised crime and
cross-border insurgencies into rump-Serbia and Macedonia, the TMK
nevertheless survives as the recipient of foreign funding and
training.
Opening the door, Gashi saw a group of men in British uniform standing
in the corridor. &#8220;They didn&#8217;t say anything,&#8221; he
remembers. &#8220;Without a word they leapt upon me, threw me on the
ground and handcuffed my arms behind my back.&#8221;
Gashi was hooded, driven away, and eventually removed from the vehicle
and frogmarched into a small room. &#8220;There they removed the hood
from me. I was standing on a small wooden pallet. In front of me were
three armed men pointing their guns at me, and a woman. All were in
uniform. The woman spoke bad Albanian. She said to me, &#8216;If you
try anything these men will kill you&#8217;.&#8221;
Gashi had just been arrested by British special forces in connection
with the Nis bus bombing. He says he spent the next 12 hours standing
on the wooden pallet being questioned about the attack, and was
allowed to sit down for only 20 minutes when he became faint, before
being handed over to a UN detention facility the next day. Gashi
admitted nothing. He was a tough man. As a former guerrilla, he had
been an intelligence officer for KLA in the Llap zone, the most
northern of seven KLA operational zones that divided Kosovo.
Two other former Llap KLA fighters were arrested that day by
specialist British units: Avdi Behluli and Jusuf Veliu, the latter a
TMK captain at the time of his detention. An intensive military
intelligence operation, using a panoply of Nato resources, pointed a
finger at these men for having been part of a nine-strong active
service unit that planned and carried out the bomb attack.
A fourth suspect was detained that night by British soldiers. Unlike
the others, Florim Ejupi had no military experience. He was a
smalltime, unsophisticated Kosovar Albanian criminal who had lived in
Germany for the duration of the war. He had served four sentences in
German prisons for drug dealing, attempted manslaughter, burglary and
assault while the fighting was at its height. Yet from the start he
appeared to be the key to the investigation. It seemed that
Ejupi&#8217;s crude crime profile and inexperience had led him to make
a mistake. Of the four prisoners, he was the only one to be connected
to the scene of the crime by physical evidence as opposed to
intelligence information. A cigarette butt found at the bomb&#8217;s
hilltop firing point, along with scraps of cable wrapping paper, bore
his DNA trace, which was cross-checked for confirmation against his
DNA print on German police files.
However, in spite of his arrest, the UNMIK regional serious crime
squad responsible for the investigation was already in difficulties,
and whispers of a conspiracy were beginning to shadow the case.
At the site of the explosion on the day the bomb went off, Detective
Stu Kellock, the squad&#8217;s Canadian chief, had asked that UNMIK
put a dedicated task force together to work on the investigation, as
would have been done in any western country. That request and
subsequent ones were ignored.
&#8220;It was obvious right from the start that there were other
agendas going on that the police didn&#8217;t know about,&#8221;
Kellock says. &#8220;Technically we were in charge of the
investigation but it never seemed that way. Intelligence about the
suspects was denied to us. Information was withheld by Kfor. We were
always the last to be told what was going on. From the word go, I got
a very sinister feeling about the whole thing.&#8221;
The police claim that as soon as the four suspects were transferred to
UNMIK detention centres in Kosovo, some 12 hours after their initial
arrest by the British, a UN order restricted police interviews of the
men. Indeed, Kellock never personally managed to get access to a
single interview with the prisoners.
Another Canadian serious crimes officer, Joe McAllister, recalls:
&#8220;We were told, &#8216;These are the suspects &#8212; question
them&#8217;. Yet we had no information upon which to base our
questioning, nor any direction, and anyway we couldn&#8217;t get
proper access to the prisoners.&#8221; By early May the suspects were
no longer in UNMIK custody, and the conspiracy theories were about to
become legend.
Apparently haunted by the possibility of the suspects&#8217; escaping,
the UN ordered their transfer to the most secure detention area in the
province: the jail inside the American base at Camp Bondsteel. The
camp was home to more than 5,000 US soldiers; in its detention
facility, suspects languished in Guantanamo Bay-style fluorescent
orange suits, surrounded by concertina rolls of razor wire,
floodlights and watchtowers.
The suspects were transferred to Bondsteel on May 3. But a year ago,
on the night of May 14, Florim Ejupi, the most unsophisticated suspect
and the one man against whom physical evidence existed,
&#8220;disappeared&#8221; from the camp.
ACCORDING to Cele Gashi, the four suspects had been kept together in a
central holding area in Bondsteel &#8212; a move that allowed the
prisoners free association and itself stymied evidence procedures.
Late in the evening of May 14, Gashi, Behluli and Veliu drifted off to
sleep while Ejupi remained awake, listening to a radio. The next thing
Gashi says he remembers is American soldiers bursting into the
compound shortly after 4am. Ejupi was gone, and his transistor radio
lay on his empty bed.
The Americans later said that he had escaped using a pair of wire
cutters hidden in a spinach pie sent to the prison by his family. They
say crucial floodlights were faulty, and there are claims that an
inexperienced National Guard unit had left a stretch of perimeter wire
unobserved for 100 minutes.
Soon, though, outraged UNMIK police officers were offering a different
story. They claim that from the moment the four suspects were
transferred to camp Bondsteel, interview access, already difficult,
was further obstructed by the Americans.
Some officers go on to claim that Ejupi had been a source for US
intelligence. They believe that Ejupi was released from Bondsteel
either because US intelligence agencies did not wish to be implicated
by association in the bombing of the Nis Express, or because they
wanted to establish the identities of the men who authorised the bomb
attack to use for their own ends. Both escape and conspiracy theories
challenge belief. &#8220;It&#8217;s not clear cut either way,&#8221;
one senior UNMIK official admits. &#8220;We really don&#8217;t know
what happened with Ejupi. It is possible that he was released, but if
that was the case then it was the act of an agency operating without
State Department or Pentagon approval. In the big picture the
Americans had far more to lose than to gain from the
&#8216;disappearance&#8217;, however it happened.&#8221;
WHATEVER the real truth, news of Ejupi&#8217;s flight further crushed
morale among the police investigators. Kellock says: &#8220;I would
use the word &#8216;devastating&#8217;. It called into question the
whole reason why we were in Kosovo, and any questions we had
concerning Ejupi&#8217;s escape remain to this day unanswered. From
that moment on, the writing was on the wall for our
investigation.&#8221;
Though three suspects, Gashi, Behluli and Veliu, remained in custody,
this was of scant consolation to the police. They say that they had no
wiretaps or covert surveillance to monitor associates of the
prisoners. Witnesses were afraid to come forward from a society that
has traditionally been impenetrable for law enforcers. Nato continued
to withold its intelligence. And human rights groups in the UN and
OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) ensured
that the suspects&#8217; rights were so rigorously upheld that the few
police interviews conducted were heavily restricted.
The investigation was already being scaled down. In the absence of a
dedicated taskforce, the 18-strong serious crimes squad was having to
divert its resources to other crimes. By midsummer there were only
three detectives still involved with the case. And a high turnover of
UN personnel meant that few of the original investigators remained.
McAllister took over the job of lead investigator in June, but was
removed from the post by the UN in August for speaking to a journalist
about his frustrations. After his departure the file on the Nis
Express became the responsibility of a single detective, and the
investigation all but ceased.
Paradoxically, this was the one time when the UN should have poured
resources into spreading the scope of the investigation. The presence
of the remaining three suspects in custody was becoming a legal
embarrassment. Their continued detention was the result of an
Executive Hold order by Hans Haekkerup, the senior UN administrator in
Kosovo; this was a special circumstances option that allowed for an
extra-judicial detention, but was increasingly coming under criticism
by human rights groups.
In the autumn, UNMIK created a Detention Review Commission of three
international judges to examine the case, validate (if appropriate)
Haekkerup&#8217;s Executive Hold order and return the suspects&#8217;
detention to a judicial framework.
The three judges were given access to the Nato intelligence that lay
behind the arrests. In September, 2001, they decided that the
intelligence was compelling enough to allow for the suspects&#8217;
continued detention of 90 days before the case went to Kosovo&#8217;s
Supreme Court.
The onus, therefore, was on the police to produce more evidence to put
before the Supreme Court. Yet their investigation was already dead in
the water and no attempt was made to revive it. The 90 days expired
and, on December 18 last year, the case went before the Supreme Court.
This body was not given access to Nato&#8217;s intelligence files, and
in the absence of any fresh evidence, it recommended the immediate
release of the three suspects.
ANY remaining trust held by Kosovo&#8217;s Serbs in UNMIK, Kfor or
justice in the province disintegrated after the men were set free. The
trio, still terrorist suspects in an unclosed case, were given local
heroes&#8217; welcomes after they left jail. Cele Gashi and Jusuf
Veliu were embraced publicly by senior TMK officers. In January, Gashi
returned to his position as a TMK colonel in Pristina; Veliu was
reinstated as a TMK captain. Nato officials in Kosovo denied that this
move had been officially sanctioned. Yet six weeks later both men were
in barracks and in uniform.
In UNMIK there is confusion as to whether Gashi and Veliu were ever
even suspended from the TMK in the first place, some officials even
suggesting that the suspects were being paid out of a UN-regulated
budget during their time in custody.
As for Florim Ejupi, he remains &#8220;missing&#8221;; after a year,
the mystery surrounding his escape remains undiminished.

 
Alla faccia delle fantasie :))
E alla fine l'unico che sembra collegato con il delitto, ma con prove
ben lungi dall'essere determinanti, risulta essere ancora libero :)
-Stefano