... която търпи същите критики за позоваване на анонимни източници. Забележете, аз не претендирма че този материал доказва нещо. Просто илюстрация, че нашия безродник цитира само тези вестникарски спекулации и политически сили които му изнасят. Serbs admit massacre cover-up, phone tap reveals Date: 29/01/99 By R. JEFFREY SMITH in Racak, Yugoslavia The massacre of 45 Albanian civilians here was ordered by senior Serbian officials in Belgrade, who then orchestrated a cover-up following an international outcry, according to telephone conversations intercepted by Western governments. Angered by the killing of three Serbian troops, senior officials in Belgrade ordered government forces to "go in heavy" on the village on January 15 to find Albanian guerillas who the Serb authorities believed were responsible for the soldiers' deaths, according to the intercepts. As the civilian death toll mounted, and in the face of international condemnation, Yugoslavia's Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Nikola Sainovic, and the officer in command of Interior Ministry forces in Kosovo, General Sreten Lukic, systematically sought to cover up what had taken place, according to telephone conversations between the two men. Details of the conversations, which were made available by Western sources familiar with them, shed new light on the attack and its aftermath. The calls show that the assault on Racak was monitored closely at the highest levels of the Yugoslav Government, and controlled by General Lukic. In a series of telephone conversations, Mr Sainovic and General Lukic expressed concern about international reaction to the assault and discussed how to make the killings look as if they had resulted from a battle between government troops and Kosovo Liberation Army guerillas. The objective was to challenge claims by survivors - later supported by international monitors stationed in Kosovo - that the victims had been executed in a massacre, and to defuse pressures for a NATO military response. Mr Sainovic is the highest-ranking official in the Yugoslav Government responsible for Kosovo matters. Western officials said they understand that he reports to Yugoslavia's President Slobadan Milosevic on Kosovo issues. "We often see him as the link between the government in Belgrade and the administration down here" in Kosovo, one said. The attack on Racak "was a search and destroy mission" with explicit approval in Belgrade, a source said. As the attack on Racak was under way, Mr Sainovic called General Lukic from Belgrade, Western sources said. Mr Sainovic was aware that the combined assault was going on, and he wanted the general to tell him how many people had been killed. General Lukic replied that at that moment the tally stood at 22, according to the sources. In calls over the following days, the two men expressed concern about the international outcry and discussed how to make the killings look like the result of a pitched battle. One measure Mr Sainovic suggested was to seal Kosovo's southern border with Macedonia to prevent Ms Louise Arbour, a United Nations war crimes investigator, from entering the country. Ms Arbour was turned back. Another was to demand that Interior Ministry troops should fight to regain control of the killing site and reclaim the bodies. Serbian forces launched a second assault on the village two days later, and on January 18 they seized the bodies from a mosque and transferred them to a morgue in the capital, Pristina. A third measure was to see if the deaths could be blamed on an independent, armed group. Mr Sainovic was told this claim was not feasible. Shortly after the attack, a Yugoslav Government spokesman said the bodies found on the hillside were armed and uniformed members of the KLA. That account was challenged by international inspectors and journalists who had arrived on the scene on January 16 and found dozens of corpses, all in civilian clothes. The Government later alleged that some of the victims were accidentally caught in a cross-fire with rebel forces or deliberately slain by the guerillas to provoke international outrage. But survivors, inspectors and rebels who were in the area at the time say little shooting occurred inside the town during the early hours of the assault and that no battle was under way at around 1pm, when most victims are said to have died. These sources say that KLA forces were not deployed near the gully where the bodies of more than 23 people were found. A team of forensic pathologists who arrived from Finland last Friday has found nothing to contradict these accounts, according to a Western official. "A picture is beginning to emerge from the autopsies, and it is a tragic one," said another source. The types of wounds indicate the victims were "humiliated" before being shot at from several different directions, this source added. - The Washington Post This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorised use, copying or mirroring is prohibited.