Mass Grave Found in Kosovo Dump

LONDON —  British forensic experts have uncovered a mass grave in Kosovo containing the bodies of 50 people, including women and children, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said Thursday.

Cook said the grave was the largest so far uncovered by the forensic team and reiterated Britain’s call for Serbian officials to be brought to justice for a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Kosovo Albanians.

The bodies were found buried beneath a garbage dump in Ljubidza, four miles north of the town of Prizren.

“We believe there are 50 bodies in the grave,” Cook said after talks with Hashim Thaci, political leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Before Wednesday’s discovery, the forensic team already had exhumed 280 bodies found in eight sites around Kosovo. Cook said many of the bodies were children, and one was only 2 years old.

He said all the evidence gathered by the experts would be made available to an international war crimes tribunal that already has indicted Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

“No country is more committed than Britain to bringing to justice those who carried out the atrocities which outraged the world and led to our action to make sure that Belgrade would not continue that repression,” Cook told reporters in London.

Britain was a leading hawk in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which bombed Yugoslavia for 11 weeks to stop a Serbian offensive against separatist ethnic Albanian guerrillas in Kosovo that had escalated into a campaign to expel the population and destroy their towns and villages.

British officials said the grave at Ljubidza contained the bodies of a “considerable number” of women and children. Work to exhume the corpses was expected to take several days.

Meanwhile, Thaci urged an end to ethnic Albanian revenge attacks on Serbs and called for Serbs to come back to Kosovo.

“We are interested in establishing in Kosovo a multiethnic society,” he said after meeting with Cook in London.

His comments were sure to be ignored by Serbs in Kosovo and elsewhere, who blame the KLA for anti-Serb violence since Milosevic’s troops left in June as part of a peace agreement to end the bombing.

Most of the 200,000 Serbs who lived in Kosovo before the war have fled.