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THE UN YUGOSLAV war crimes court has acquitted Kosovo’s ex-prime minister Ramush Haradinaj and two aides in a retrial on charges of murder and torture during the 1990s war of independence from Belgrade.
“The chamber finds you not guilty on all counts in the indictment,” Judge Bakone Justice Moloto told the court in The Hague this morning, ordering the men released.
Judges found that the accused had not taken part in a “joint criminal enterprise” to cleanse the area of ethnic Serbs, and that some witness testimony was unreliable.
Moloto said one witness may not have been in the Jablanica detention camp where alleged abuses took place and “may have told what he heard from others.”
Following one incident of abuse “a KLA soldier apologised for the incident and blamed it on extremist groups within the KLA,” the judge said.
“There is no credible evidence that Haradinaj was even aware of the crimes committed at Jablanica,” Moloto said.
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Is this the guy that openly admitted that he murdered policemen, Serbs, Albanians that did not cooperate, etc? The guy who had something like 18 witnesses against him, out of which 16 all of a sudden caught a terminal case of death? :)
This Hague tribunal is becoming more and more like a Muppet Show. The only difference is that real people, with real families, real victims are suffering for the past 20 years because of this bunch of Muppets playing judges.
According to Amnesty International an estimated 800 non-Albanians were allegedly abducted and murdered by members of the KLA and to date very few of those suspected of criminal responsibility for these abductions have been prosecuted in Kosovo. In this instance, most of Harandinaj and his two pals from the Kosovo Liberation Army were accused of atrocities against Serb, Albanian and Roma civilians in 1998, the majority of the murdered vicims were ironically (for those celebrating in Pristina tonight) ethnic Albanians.
I agree with you Dragutin. The Hague is a tool of the West. That man is a criminal who should be locked up. But then again, he was never going to be found guilty. The US has its biggest base our used the US on Kosovo, one of the rewards it got for supporting Kosovo independence.
Bush, Blair and a good many other Western leaders should have been tried by the Hague but they never were.
If you suggested this in Western media you would be ridiculed. They caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent through unjust sanctions abs am even more criminal war.
Agree completely, Bill Clinton is a war criminal but he gets the red carpet treatment and lived like a celebrity
have your say