Key Milosevic trial witness arrested in Spain

Spanish police arrested a suspected Serb hit-man wanted in the murder of a Kosovo Albanian human rights activist believed to have had evidence implicating Slobodan Milosevic in dozens of murders, authorities said today.

Police say the arrest of Veselin Vukotic, a master of disguise who confounded authorities in Europe and Latin America for 16 years, could reveal key evidence in the trial against the former Yugoslav president at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.

Milosevic faces more than 60 counts, including genocide, for his role in the wars in the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

“The detention of Vukotic could be an essential piece in the case against Milosevic,” police said, adding that the war crimes tribunal has “shown great interest” in his capture.

Vukotic was arrested over the weekend at Madrid’s Barajas airport after arriving from Paris, a police statement said.

He was allegedly carrying a high-quality counterfeit Croat passport and driver’s licence in the name of Ludvig Bulic, but police had been tipped off to his arrival and were waiting for him.

Police said Vukotic, 47, used various aliases to avoid capture and was constantly on the move between Europe and Latin America, usually staying at luxury hotels and maintaining an expensive lifestyle.

It was not clear who financed him. He was believed to have been living under an assumed name, most recently in Barcelona, with his wife and two daughters.

Spanish police said Vukotic and two other men killed Enver Hadri, an ethnic Albanian from Kosovo, in Brussels on February 25, 1990. The killers pulled up beside Hadri’s car as he waited for a traffic light to change, and shot him in the head using a gun that had a silencer attached to it.

Hadri had been advocating severing ties between Kosovo and Serbia since the late 1960s. He moved to Brussels around that time, and later started a political magazine, through which he called for the unification of Albanian-speaking areas in a single state in the Balkans.

Spanish police said Hadri had been carrying documents which tied Milosevic to as many as 34 murders of prominent people, although the police gave no details and said they had no independent confirmation.

Reshat Sahitaj, an associate of Hadri’s, said the documents were files on the killings of 23 ethnic Albanians allegedly killed by the Serb security service in late 1989 and early 1990 in Kosovo.

Sahitaj said the files – including the victims’ names and details of where they were killed – were intended to back up a European Parliament resolution on the difficult situation in the province at the time.

In April 2003, a protected UN war crimes prosecution witness who said he had worked for Yugoslavia’s secret service claimed in Milosevic’s trial in The Hague that Vukotic once admitted to killing Hadri.

The witness said that both Milosevic and Vukotic attended an informal meeting of Serbian leaders and police officials in Novi Sad in March 1993.

“Vukotic told me about the liquidation of Albanians around Europe,” said the protected witness. “He did it under the orders of the Yugoslav secret service. The last he mentioned was that he killed Hadri.”

After the testimony, Milosevic vehemently denied that he attended any such meeting.

A month after the Hadri killing, Vukotic allegedly murdered one of his accomplices in that crime during a fight at a Belgrade discotheque. The man believed to have been the third Hadri shooter, Darko Asanin, was killed in 1995.

In 1997, Vukotic allegedly killed another man, this time in a disco in Montenegro.

Vukotic, wanted in both Belgium and Serbia-Montenegro, is to be brought before Spain’s National Court in Madrid.