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A top NATO investigator has offered chilling new evidence that Kosovo's Serbs are being slain by ethnic Albanians bent on revenge.
Most of the killings under investigation in and around Kosovo's capital are apparent executions in which Serbs had their hands bound and were made to kneel before being shot, most with a single bullet to the back of the head. Many had been blindfolded.
These characteristics were common in "dozens" of slayings committed since NATO-led peacekeepers occupied Kosovo on June12, said Major John Wooldridge, a senior investigator with Britain's Royal Military Police.
He deemed the killings "executions" in which ethnic hatred was the presumed motive.
Of more than 200 killings in Kosovo since the NATO-led peace force moved in, about 120 have been in the British sector.
NATO and United Nations officials have for weeks denounced revenge killings, but Major Wooldridge's comments provided the most detailed evidence to date about them.
Major Wooldridge, the top criminal investigator in the British-controlled sector of Kosovo that includes Pristina, said not only Serbs were being killed. But the rate of murder of Serbs, only about 200,000, or 10per cent of the population even before the conflict, was far higher than among the ethnic Albanian majority.
More than 172,060 people, mostly Serbs and Gypsies, have fled Kosovo since the Yugoslav Government signed a peace agreement with NATO, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported in Belgrade on July 26.