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FBI investigators sift through burned buildings for evidence of war crimes  ALSO: NATO bombing: Wrong target warning never passed along Solana to Kosovars: 'Give peace a chance' Gunmen who fired on Marines believed to be Serbs Yugoslav parliament lifts state of war

June 24, 1999
Web posted at: 3:46 p.m. EDT (1946 GMT)

In this story: Atrocity sites 'popping up every day' Yugoslavia denies allegations RELATED STORIES, SITES

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- As an FBI team in Kosovo looked for evidence linking atrocities there to specific individuals, the United States on Thursday offered up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of alleged war criminals in Yugoslavia, including President Slobodan Milosevic.

The reward would go to "those who provide information that leads to the transfer of indicted war criminals" to the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague, said State Department spokesman James Rubin.

Milosevic and four other senior military and civilian officials were indicted in May by the tribunal. Earlier indictments, issued following the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, named Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, wartime civilian and military leaders of the Bosnian Serbs.

The $5 million offer, Rubin said, "is intended to increase the prospects that indictees who are currently at large will be transferred to the custody of the tribunal for trial. In all, he said, there are "a couple of dozen" indictees.

The reward "applies to persons indicted by the tribunal or who may be indicted in the future for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia," he said.

In western Kosovo, FBI investigators were investigating two suspected massacre sites named in the war crimes indictment of Milosevic.

The U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, David Scheffer, said their work in the town of Djakovica would be vital to uncovering evidence Serbs tried to hide or destroy.

Human remains in Djakovica

He told reporters the Serb army and the military police "violated so many different laws of war that they were almost the perfect model of how not to conduct warfare."

"There's a profusion of atrocity sites throughout Kosovo," Scheffer said. "They are popping up every day."

The FBI team is working inside a house in Djakovica where war crimes prosecutors assert that on April 2 a total of 20 people -- women and children -- were herded and shot by Serb troops bent on ridding Kosovo of ethnic Albanians.

The troops then allegedly burned the house and the corpses.

The FBI will also excavate a nearby site where prosecutors allege six ethnic Albanian men were executed and buried in March.

The agency said it would take about a week to photograph human remains, catalog the scene and take samples they hope will be used in prosecutions for alleged war crimes.

Villagers say the 26 deaths under investigation in Djakovica are just part of the story. Residents there have come forward with "400 or 500 names of men who remain missing and whose fate is utterly unknown," Scheffer said.

FBI Director Louis Freeh has called Kosovo "one of the largest crime scenes in history."

In Belgrade, the Yugoslav government Thursday rejected charges of war crimes as "propaganda," and blamed others for the deaths.

"Most of the killings are done by the (Kosovo Liberation Army) and by NATO aggression," Goran Matic, minister without portfolio in the Yugoslav federal government, told CNN.

"Investigation is necessary," he said, "but not by the Hague Tribunal which is a political tribunal. It is a political arm of the United States administration to prosecute the people it doesn't like."

Most of what the tribunal has alleged is "propaganda," he said.

Correspondent Christiane Amanpour contributed to this report.