Extremists accused of Kosovo family killings
Ethnic Albanian extremists were today accused of killing a Kosovo Serb family of three whose bodies were found in their blazing home.
The attack condemned as a hate crime by UN officials and Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian prime minister.
The burned bodies of Slobodan Stolic, 80, his wife Radmila, 78, and their 53 year-old son, Lubinjko, were found inside their home in Obilic, an ethnically mixed town ten miles from Pristina.
“They had serious body injuries prior to the burning with a sharp object, with an axe,” said UN spokesman Andrea Angeli.
Michael Steiner, Kosovo’s UN administrator, called the killings “a heinous act, a perfidious crime which was directed against multi-ethnicity in Kosovo.
“We need justice here and find those who are responsible,” Steiner said, announcing creation of a special police squad to investigate the killings.
Visiting the site with Steiner, Prime Minister Bajram Rexhepi, an ethnic Albanian, called the killing “a monstrous crime.”
Steiner and Rexhepi were booed and jeered by a crowd of angry local Serbs gathered in the garden of the family’s charred house. They accused the leaders of failing to provide security for their community.
The killings are the gravest this year in the ethnically tense province of two million and a major setback for stepped-up international efforts to create conditions for the return of Serbs and other minorities.
Kosovo has been administered by the UN and Nato since mid-1999, after a Nato air war halted a Serb military crackdown on separatist ethnic Albanians.
Since then, the Serb minority has been targeted by ethnic Albanian extremists in revenge attacks for wartime atrocities. Some 200,000 Serbs have fled the province, and dozens have been killed in such attacks.
