Here is some more info on the jail bombing by an AP writer :
NATO Bombs Said To Kill 19 People
By KATARINA KRATOVAC Associated Press Writer
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) -- NATO bombed a Kosovo jail six times Friday, killing at least 19 people and injuring scores in the initial strikes, Yugoslav media reported. A new tide of Kosovo refugees riding tractors poured across Yugoslavia's southern borders into Albania -- breaking a weeklong lull.
NATO officials said bombers were targeting a ''security complex'' in the town of Istok but had no word on casualties.
Alliance bombers rained missiles in daylight across Serbia and returned in the evening. Planes roared over Belgrade late Friday and early Saturday, and heavy anti-aircraft fire resounded across the capital. There was no immediate word on casualties or damage, but widespread power cuts blacked out parts of the city.
Many in the wave of 3,700 spoke of Serb security forces banging on their doors and ordering them to immediately leave their homeland. President Slobodan Milosevic blamed the ''NATO aggressor'' for the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians.
After days of reports of mass desertions by Yugoslav army reservists, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said troops who showed up in two central Serbian towns this week were just ''regular soldiers returning home'' as part of a reduction of Serb forces in Kosovo.
''There are no desertions,'' Nebojsa Vujovic said.
Some 400 army reservists returned this week to Aleksandrovac and Krusevac, saying they would not go back to the front-line, said news reports in Montenegro, the republic that along with Serbia forms Yugoslavia.
Montenegro's government opposes Milosevic and his confrontation with NATO over Kosovo, a secessionist-minded province in southern Serbia.
The United States says it has reports of large-scale desertions by Yugoslav army reservists. There have also been accounts of anti-war demonstrations by soldiers.
In the Montenegrin town Cetinje, 5,000 people -- almost one-third of the population -- on Friday protested the recent Yugoslav army reinforcements around their city and demanded the military withdraw.
''We are here to ask loudly what these people in fatigues are doing in our city,'' Mirko Dapcevic declared to huge applause. The demonstration was one of the first and certainly the biggest protest against the Yugoslav army in Montenegro.
In Serbia, NATO airstrikes repeatedly blasted the Dubrava jail at Istok in northwestern Kosovo. Serb officials said the 1,000-inmate prison held mainly supporters of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army. NATO officials in Brussels, Belgium, said a ''security complex'' was the focus of attacks and didn't explain why a jail might have been hit repeatedly.
Western reporters accompanying the first U.N. mission to Kosovo since the start of the 8-week air campaign saw seven bloodied corpses covered by blankets in the jail's grassy courtyard, shrapnel-pocked buildings, and nervous-looking guards with automatic weapons keeping prisoners at bay.
One prisoner called out, ''Help us! There are a lot of wounded back there!'' and a guard replied, ''OK, bring them all into the hall. We've called an ambulance, but the road is bad.''
Milosevic, in a statement after meeting a Greek parliamentary delegation, reiterated demands for an end to NATO bombings.
NATO's other ''big crime,'' he added, ''is the mean accusation against our country for the exodus of Albanians from Kosovo, although it is well known that the movement of Albanians and other residents in Kosovo from their homes was caused by the bombing.''
NATO's peace demands include a total withdrawal of Milosevic's 40,000 troops and special police from Kosovo and the deployment of an international peacekeeping force with NATO at its core. Milosevic opposes both conditions.
In Kosovo, NATO bombs killed one person late Friday in an attack on the center of Djakovica, 40 miles from the provincial capital, Pristina, the media said.
Seven people, including four children, were injured when bombs slammed into fuel storage tanks -- for the seventh time in the campaign -- and a TV and radio transmitter in Smederevo, 30 miles southeast of Belgrade, Tanjug, the state-controlled news agency, reported.
Yugoslav media reported attacks later Friday on bridges and on several Serbian towns, including Uzice, central Serbia, Pozega in the southeast, and Bor, in the east, where bombs hit factories and fuel depots, sending smoke billowing across the town.
In Bonn, Germany, envoys from seven Western nations and Russia failed to reach agreement on a draft resolution backing NATO's five main terms for ending the conflict.
In Moscow, the other center of diplomatic activity, Russia's Balkans envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin abruptly canceled meetings. Officials close to the negotiations could not offer a reason but said they did not think the talks were in trouble. Russia opposes the NATO air campaign.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, meanwhile, met in Moscow with Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou and U.N. envoy Carl Bildt.
Talbott and the Finnish president who has become an intermediary in the talks over Kosovo are to return next week to Russia, which has religious and cultural ties to Serbia.
They met for more than seven hours late Thursday and early Friday at a government retreat outside Moscow with Chernomyrdin for what Talbott described as ''constructive'' talks.
In New York, Russian U.N. Ambassador Sergey Lavrov warned that the alliance's intensified bombing campaign and civilian casualties were making peace negotiations more difficult.
But British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said Russia realizes that a peace agreement means getting Milosevic to accept an international peacekeeping force in Kosovo with a strong NATO role.
''We've closed the gap enormously with movement from Russia, because Russia was uncomfortable that it was so isolated,'' Cook said in an interview with the United States' Public Broadcasting Service. ''It found it was just about the only country in the world ... solidly with Milosevic.''
Some 800,000 ethnic Albanians have fled Kosovo, mainly to Albania and Macedonia, since NATO airstrikes started March 24.
About 2,000 people died in Kosovo from February 1998 until NATO intervened. |
