BELGRADE, Sep 11 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Serbia has indicted nine ex-paramilitaries over the killing of 43 ethnic Albanians during the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict, the country's war crimes prosecutors' office said on Saturday.
The move appeared to be a sign of Serbian resolve to deal with its wartime past and join the European Union.
Prosecuting atrocities committed by Serbs during the 1990s wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, Serbia's former southern province, is a key condition for Belgrade to speed up its bid to join the 27-member EU.
Nine men who served with a paramilitary unit known as The Jackals were indicted for the killing of the ethnic Albanian civilians in the Kosovo village of Cuska on May 14, 1999, the statement from the Belgrade-based Special War Crimes Prosecutor's Office said. They were detained in March.
"The defendants showed immense cruelty ... often firing large number of rounds into the backs of their victims. They later burnt bodies to conceal evidence and prevent identification of their victims," the statement said.
The indictment arose from cooperation between the war crimes prosecutors office and Eulex, the EU judicial and police mission in Kosovo, the Eulex, the statement added.
The Jackals fought alongside Serbian security forces in Kosovo. They were also implicated in rapes, beatings, plundering and burning of homes and property, it said.
INDICTMENT A DECADE IN THE MAKING
The indictment was the product of a decade of investigation and was one of the most significant since pro-Western authorities started arresting former military, paramilitary or police figures for war crimes after Milosevic's 2000 ouster.
Thousands died during the Kosovo war and hundreds of thousands fled their homes. The conflict ended with NATO air strikes that forced Serbia to end its crackdown on independence-seeking ethnic Albanians.
Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008.
The indictment emerged days after Serbia endorsed a compromise United Nations resolution on Kosovo, dropping earlier demands to reopen talks on the status of its former province, in a shift of position towards the EU.
Serbia agreed to an EU-backed dialogue with Kosovo that the non-binding General Assembly resolution said would aim to promote cooperation. The resolution was passed by acclamation by the 192-nation assembly.
Several top Serbian officials, police and military commanders, including the late former president Slobodan Milosevic, have been tried for atrocities in Kosovo before the United Nations war crimes court in The Hague.
Serbia is seeking ratification of a Stabilisation and Association Agreement, a stage towards EU membership. To do so, it must still arrest and extradite Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb wartime commander sought by the UN court for genocide in the 1995 mass killing of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.
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