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BELGRADE, Yugoslavia, Aug. 26 (UPI) Yugoslav Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic is accusing U.S. KFOR forces of trying to cover up the discovery of a mass grave containing the bodies of Serbs in Kosovo and demanded an urgent meeting of the U.N. Security Council.
Jovanovic said in letters to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the Security Council Wednesday that U.S. peacekeepers had tried to conceal the mass grave found at the village of Ugljare as long ago as July 24.
He claimed they did so in order to avoid the reaction of international public opinion that "this crime against humanity" might provoke as it took place only a day after the massacre of 14 Serb farmers at Staro Gradsko. The letter was released by the Yugoslav foreign ministry and published Thursday by Belgrade media.
A United Nations police spokesman in Gnjilane was reported by Yugoslav state-run media as saying that 13 bodies of Serbs had been laid out in a chapel in the town but he did not say where the bodies had been found.
The media said the bodies had been brought from Ugljare, six miles east of Gnjilane, and that four bodies had been identified.
KFOR spokesman in Pristina, Maj. Roland Lavoie, told Belgrade Radio B2-92 that war crimes tribunal investigators had examined the Ugljare grave where 11 bodies had been dug up, four of which identified as those of killed Serbs. The spokesman also said the investigators would establish the identities of the other bodies, the circumstances of their death and whether there were more bodies in the grave.
Serbian Orthodox Church sources in Kosovo are reported by Radio B2-92 today to have said two Serbs and three Gypsies had been killed in the western town of Prizren and that 12 Gypsies and two Serbs, both from Tetovo in Macedonia, had been kidnapped in the village of Ljutoglav since Tuesday.
News agency Beta quoted church sources as saying about 10 Albanians, armed with automatic weapons and hand-held rocket launchers, attacked and beat four Serb shepherds at the village of Pasjane, near Gnjilane.
Some Russian KFOR peacekeepers who came to the shepherds' rescue were fired on by the Albanians and withdrew to seek help from American KFOR forces after an explosion believed to have been caused by a missile.