BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro — In a landmark war crimes trial, a Serb police officer was convicted Wednesday and sentenced to 20 years in prison for executing 14 ethnic Albanian civilians — including children — during the Kosovo conflict.
Sasa Cvjetan, a member of Serbia's notorious Scorpions "anti-terrorist" police unit, denied shooting a group of women, children and elderly in the town of Podujevo, one of the worst massacres of the Kosovo war. Five people survived the March 1999 shooting, which one witness said occurred in "less than a minute."
After the three-judge panel handed down the maximum prison sentence, Cvjetan crossed himself and said, "I'm not guilty." During the trial, he insisted he was being singled out as a scapegoat.
The trial, which included testimony from children who survived the massacre, attracted international attention because it is unusual for Serb courts to try Serbs for war crimes.
Serbia is still struggling to come to terms with atrocities committed by Serb troops in Kosovo, where they cracked down on independence-minded ethnic Albanians under the regime of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
War crimes trials in Serbia became possible following Milosevic's ouster in 2000 by a pro-democracy coalition and his extradition a year later to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.
So far, only four former Serb soldiers have been convicted and sentenced by a military court in Serbia for Kosovo war crimes, receiving from three to seven years in jail in 2002. Six Serb paramilitary soldiers are currently standing trial in Belgrade for alleged war crimes committed in Croatia in 1992.
Serb authorities, seeking to deflect some of the pressure from the U.N. tribunal to arrest and extradite suspects, created their own war crimes court to deal with atrocities committed in Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia.
In key testimony during Cvjetan's trial, policeman Goran Stoparic described how members of his paramilitary unit, including the defendant, executed the civilians.
Stoparic said his reserve police unit took control of the northern Kosovo town just four days after NATO began airstrikes in 1999 to end the Serb crackdown.
Stoparic testified that he saw Cvjetan and five other Serb policemen take the 14 civilians into a back yard, where they were shot. He did not see the bodies but heard the shots and saw the policemen emerge from the compound reloading their guns, he said.
"The shooting lasted less than a minute," Stoparic said.
Prosecutors requested the maximum sentence for Cvjetan, arguing that he was aware of his actions and intentionally executed civilians.
An estimated 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed during the 1998-99 fighting in Kosovo, when Serbian security forces launched a brutal crackdown.
Reports of Serb atrocities prompted NATO to bomb the country for nearly three months in 1999 before Milosevic relinquished control of the province to the United Nations and NATO.