Macedonian Govt admits to killing innocent refugees

AM - Tuesday, 4 May , 2004
Reporter: Geoff Thompson

TONY EASTLEY: A court in Turkey has charged nine suspected al-Qaeda operatives in connection with alleged plans to bomb a NATO summit in Istanbul next month. In all, 16 men detained were in the city of Bursa after police tracked them for a year as they allegedly hatched plans to attack the summit set for June.

But elsewhere in region investigations under the banner of the war against terror have gone badly wrong. In March 2002, police in Macedonia gunned down seven alleged terrorists, just six months after the September 11 attacks in the United States.

This week the Macedonian Government has admitted that it made the whole thing up. Far from being terrorists, the six Pakistanis and one Indian killed by police were innocent immigrants kidnapped at a border and taken to the Macedonian capital to be executed in a dummy operation just so Macedonia could be seen to be doing its part in the war on terror.

Now the Macedonian Government is being sued for $17 million in compensation, as South Asia Correspondent Geoff Thompson reports from Islamabad.

GEOFF THOMPSON: Remember the first six months of the US-led war on terror, just after the September 11 attacks when there was a frenzy of hyper-security as fear and suspicion gripped the world?

It was then that the government of Macedonia also put itself on the war on terror map – when its special police forces gunned down six Pakistanis and one Indian they claimed were terrorists intending to target western interests in Europe in March of 2002.

Pakistan's Information Minister Sheikh Rashid says Pakistan disputed this claim from the beginning.

SHEIKH RASHID: At that time we had said that they are not terrorists. They were looking for a job – they were unemployed people who were there, maybe illegally, so they made a case, a drama, to show that they were terrorists and they want to prove that they are very active against the terrorism, and in this way, they have killed these innocent people.

GEOFF THOMPSON: And now an astonishing admission from the new Macedonian Government has proven Pakistan to be tragically correct.

This week Macedonian police revealed the results of an investigation, which shows that the seven men were nothing but illegal immigrants kidnapped by police at a border crossing, allegedly under the instruction of Macedonia's then Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski.

He allegedly instructed his police chief to find immigrants who could fit the description of Islamic terrorists.

The kidnapped men were then taken to place outside the Macedonian capital and gunned down. TV footage showed the dead men with pistols stuck in their waistbands as the Macedonian public and the world was told they died after ambushing a police patrol.

Ansar Burney of the London-based human rights advocacy group the Ansar Burney Welfare Trust is now suing Macedonia for about $17 million on behalf of the families of each of the victims.

ANSAR BURNEY: …who left for European countries in search of a better future. Having beautiful dreams in their eyes, were arrested at Macedonia border. The Macedonian police took them outside the US embassy in the capital Skopje, and brutally murdered them in a fake encounter and told the world that they were a terrorist, trained in Pakistani camps and had planned to strike American and European interests.

GEOFF THOMPSON: But no they weren't. In the words of Macedonian Interior Ministry spokeswoman Mirjana Kontevska, the whole affair was set up to score political points with the international community".

The mother of one of the victims, 22-year-old Umar Farooq, who came from a village in eastern Pakistan – provides a different perspective.

"He had nothing to do with terrorism," she says. "I sold my jewellery, borrowed money from relatives and added them to my life savings" to send my son abroad.

For AM, this is Geoff Thompson in Islamabad.

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