Marinkovic: Racak was ethnic Albanian terrorist stronghold, no civilians were killed there

BELGRADE - Danica Marinkovic, the investigative judge in the 1999 Racak case, said on Thursday the Racak village in Kosovo-Metohija had been a stronghold of ethnic Albanian terrorists and that there was evidence that terrorists - and not civilians - had been killed in January 15, 1999 clashes with security forces.

Speaking to Tanjug, Marinkovic said her investigation team had found evidence on the site indicating that Racak was not a massacre of innocent ethnic Albanian civilians, as claimed by William Walker, who headed an OSCE observation mission at the time.

"Racak was a big stronghold and members of a terrorist gang who operated from within that area were there, carrying out terrorist attacks, there were killings of Serbian police officers, military personnel and civilians - ethnic Albanians and Serbs. On that day, January 15, 1999, Serbian police planned and organised an anti-terrorist operation to find and arrest the perpetrators of the crime of terrorism," Marinkovic said, noting that the operation had been both legitimate and legal and that members of the so-called "Kosovo Liberation Army" had been killed as a result.

"They were terrorists, ethnic Albanian terrorists who had been active in the area for an extended period of time," she said.

Marinkovic said she had found evidence of this after finally succeeding in getting into Racak three days later, on January 18, 1999.

"I was prevented from doing so, shot at, and threatened and blackmailed by foreigners. I did not yield to any of that, and when I entered the Racak village, I found large arms caches. Records of a tonne of weapons were made, and they ranged from automatic rifles to machine guns, crates full of ammunition, hand grenades, uniforms with their 'KLA' insignia. The whole village was dug out, in trenches, we went around those trenches and a large quantity of rounds and casings was found in those trenches. We also found a machine gun nest dug into a hill - a large room in which we found military uniforms and blankets," Marinkovic said.

She said Serbian, Belarusian and Finnish forensic experts who had autopsied 40 bodies found in a local mosque had established everyone in that group had died from injuries inflicted by small arms, and that no evidence of a massacre had been found on any of the bodies.

"Which means that Walker said something that was not true, that he told a shameless lie..., ,...which they needed as a pretext to bomb us soon afterwards, to commit an aggression," Marinkovic added.

Commenting on the fact that, following a presentation of evidence, The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) had scrapped the Racak case from an indictment against officials of FR Yugoslavia and Serbia, Marinkovic noted that it was a "victory for us" and that Pristina was still trying to push lies about Racak.