Milosevic ‘directed’ killing unit

FORMER Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s police directly controlled a notorious Serb armed unit known as the Scorpions and gave them a license to kill in Bosnia and Kosovo, a police document showed yesterday.

The unit was one of the several Serbian paramilitary contingents that spread fear and conducted massive ethnic cleansing operations against non-Serbs in the Balkans wars in the 1990s, prominent military analyst Dejan Anastasijevic said.

The Scorpions, some 150 shaven-head men, gained international notoriety last week when a gruesome video of the July 1995 executions of six Bosnian Muslim prisoners near Srebrenica was shown on Serbian television.

After the broadcast, the nation’s leaders acknowledged for the first time their country’s role in the worst massacre in Europe since WWII when nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed.

UN war crimes prosecutors in The Hague in The Netherlands, presented as evidence yesterday, a 1999 police document that says that the Scorpions were a part of the Serbian Special Anti Terrorist Unit - and not a vigilante unit that wanted to help Serbs in Bosnia or Kosovo as Milosevic has claimed at his UN war crimes trial.