BELGRADE, Serbia, Oct. 17 (UPI) -- The chief prosecutor of The Hague war-crimes tribunal submitted to judges for confirmation Wednesday an updated version of the indictment against former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes in Kosovo, including results of investigations into the removal of traces of atrocities and the discovery of mass graves of Albanians in Serbia.
The tribunal issued the original Kosovo indictment against Milosevic and four of his closest aides in May 1999, charging them with crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war and the deportation of 700,000 Kosovo Albanians. This was while NATO's 11-week airstrikes on Yugoslavia were still in progress.
The indictment referred to the killing of several thousand Albanians, and other crimes during 1998 and up to the end of the conflict and the entry of NATO-led peacekeeping troops into Kosovo on June 10.
The prosecutor's spokeswoman Florence Hartmann was quoted by the Sense news agency as telling a news conference in The Hague Wednesday the new version contained charges for crimes discovered since then, including efforts to erase all trace of atrocities committed in Kosovo by Yugoslav and Serb security forces under Milosevic's direct control, and the results of exhumations of mass graves of Kosovo Albanians found in Serbia proper in recent months.
Nearly 400 bodies have been unearthed from six mass graves located so far: two in the special police training grounds in Batajnica just north of Belgrade; two in Petrovo Selo in Eastern Serbia, and two at Perucac storage lake in the west where bodies in two refrigerator trucks had first been dumped in the lake and later retrieved and buried at nearby sites.
Hartmann made no mention of any new indictees in the updated indictment apart from Milosevic, incumbent Serbian President Milan Milutinovic and three other former officials -- Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic, the army chief of staff, Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic, and Serbian Police Minister Vlajko Stojiljkovic.
If the judges confirm the new indictment, as is generally expected, Milosevic will be asked to plead on it on Oct. 29.
