Nicholas Wood NYT
Monday, May 3, 2004
LJUBLJANA, Slovenia Macedonia has charged its former minister of the interior with staging the killing of seven South Asian migrants two years ago, in an attempt to show the United States that the government was actively supporting the campaign against terror.
The minister, Ljube Boskovski, was accused with three senior police commanders of ordering the murder of six Pakistanis and an Indian close to the capital, Skopje, in March 2002. Two other police officers and a businessman have also been charged.
The killings were described recently by senior Western diplomats as a crude attempt by the government to win a free hand to deal harshly with Macedonia's ethnic Albanian minority, which had won major civil rights concessions from the government after a 2001 conflict.
At the time, Boskovski said the police had foiled a plot by the National Liberation Army, an ethnic Albanian guerrilla group, to attack the American, British and German embassies. The men had been killed, he said, when they opened fire on a police patrol.
When news of the deaths was first announced, photographs were shown of the men with pistols stuffed in their pockets. New automatic rifles wrapped in plastic were put on display along with new uniforms marked with the insignia of the guerrilla group, all of which the police said had been found with the dead men.
[Relatives of the victims said Sunday that they would seek legal damages, The Associated Press reported from Lahore, Pakistan.
Ansar Burney, a lawyer and head of Ansar Burney Welfare Trust International, a civil rights group that has campaigned on behalf of the victims' families, said he was preparing to file a $12 million lawsuit before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands.]
Boskovski was interior minister until September 2002, when his Macedonian nationalist party was voted out of office in parliamentary elections.
Former ethnic Albanian guerrillas are now members of a coalition government with a center-left Macedonian party.
On Friday, before the charges were announced, Boskovski denied that he had allowed the killing of civilians.
"Before I'm taken into custody, I solemnly declare I'm telling you the truth," he said, according to Reuters. "I have not given any such order to eliminate such a group. There was no order to kill civilians."
Press Back on your browser to Return
|
