> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-7-295526,00.html

THE TIMES (UK), Tuesday, May 14, 2002

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's three annual days of the dead. Most were refugees who had fled
the
Yugoslav province to escape retributive killings by Albanians after
Nato'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's immediate aftermath.

"Everyone before me was blown to pieces," she says. "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."

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's critics, the murder of 11 Serbs on a coach
sandwiched
between Nato armoured vehicles seemed to epitomise the organisation'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 "civil emergency" 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'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. "They didn't say anything," he remembers. "Without a word
they
leapt upon me, threw me on the ground and handcuffed my arms behind my
back."

Gashi was hooded, driven away, and eventually removed from the vehicle
and
frogmarched into a small room. "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, 'If you try anything these men will kill
you'."

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'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'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'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.

"It was obvious right from the start that there were other agendas going
on
that the police didn't know about," Kellock says. "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."

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: "We
were
told, 'These are the suspects - question them'. Yet we had no
information
upon which to base our questioning, nor any direction, and anyway we
couldn't get proper access to the prisoners." 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' 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, "disappeared" from the camp.

ACCORDING to Cele Gashi, the four suspects had been kept together in a
central holding area in Bondsteel - 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.
"It's not clear cut either way," one senior UNMIK official admits. "We
really don'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
'disappearance',
however it happened."

WHATEVER the real truth, news of Ejupi's flight further crushed morale
among
the police investigators. Kellock says: "I would use the word
'devastating'.
It called into question the whole reason why we were in Kosovo, and any
questions we had concerning Ejupi's escape remain to this day
unanswered.
>From that moment on, the writing was on the wall for our
investigation."

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' 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's Executive Hold order and return the suspects' 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' continued detention of 90
days
before the case went to Kosovo'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'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'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'
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 "missing"; after a year, the mystery
surrounding his escape remains undiminished.


What the acronyms mean

KLA: Kosovo Liberation Army. Albanian resistance organisation, now
undergoing demilitarisation.

TMK: Kosovo Protection Corps, created in 1999 under the aegis of Nato
and
the UN after Serb withdrawl from Kosovo. Its 5,000 members are all
former
KLA fighters.

Kfor: The Nato-led international peacekeeping force in Kosovo.

UNMIK: United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo: a civilian law
enforcement unit.