28 / 06 / 2008
It was a deliberate plot by former interior minister of the former Yugoslav Province, Ljube Boskovski and three of his top associates who staged outside Skopje, the killings of seven innocent Pakistanis .
Minister of Interior in Skopje charged for murder
FOUR YEAR OLD NEWS ARE NOT NEWS, OR ARE THEY?
Published: May 1, 2004
Former Yugoslav charged its former minister of the interior on Friday with staging the killing of seven South Asian migrants two years ago, in an attempt to show the United States that the government was actively supporting the campaign against terror.
The minister, Ljube Boskovksi, was accused with three senior police commanders of ordering the murder of six Pakistanis and an Indian close to the capital, Skopje, in March 2002. Two other police officers and a businessman have also been charged.
The killings were described recently by senior Western diplomats as a crude attempt by the government to win a free hand to deal harshly with the Former Yugoslav Republic’s ethnic Albanian minority, which had won major civil rights concessions from the government after a 2001 conflict.
At the time, Mr. Boskovski said the police had foiled a plot by the National Liberation Army, an ethnic Albanian guerrilla group, to attack the American, British and German Embassies. The men had been killed, he said, when they opened fire on a police patrol.
When news of the deaths was first announced, photographs were shown of the men with pistols stuffed in their pockets.
New automatic rifles wrapped in plastic were put on display along with new uniforms marked with the insignia of the guerrilla group, all of which the police said had been found with the dead men.
Mr. Boskovski was interior minister until September 2002 when his FYR nationalist party was voted out of office in parliamentary elections.
Former ethnic Albanian guerrillas are now members of a coalition government with a center left FYR party.
Before the charges were announced, Mr. Boskovski denied he had allowed the killing of civilians.
”Before I’m taken into custody, I solemnly declare I’m telling you the truth,” he told reporters, according to Reuters. ”I have not given any such order to eliminate such a group. There was no order to kill civilians,
Only, the seven men were not terrorists, in any form, as reported in the UK daily press.. They were immigrants between the ages of 22 and 29 passing through the Former Yugoslav Republic on route to European nations in search of work to support their families. Some of the men were carrying Quranic verses in their pockets. According to a story in the UK paper The Guardian, a mother of one of the victims said she had slipped two of these verses into her son’s pocket while seeing him off — one being the Surah Yaseen, to keep Muslims safe while traveling, and the other being the Naat De Ali to give him courage. FYR police later claimed that these were terrorist literature.
In the report, Burney is quoted saying “Who knows what other atrocities have been committed in the name of the war on terror. This whole affair has just been so incredibly evil.”
According to an Associated Press report of the incident,”Since breaking away from Yugoslavia in 1991, the Former Yugoslav Republic has been eager to win American political and economic support. It has supported the U.S.-led campaign against al-Qaida and has sent troops to Iraq.”
The truth behind this killing is that it was not any sort of accident. It was a deliberate plot by former interior minister, Ljube Boskovski and three of his top associates who staged the encounter outside of the capital city of Skopje, then reported to the world that they had killed Al Queda terrorists.
Geoff Thompson a freelance journalist and correspondent of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (another ABC), reported that Boskovski “allegedly instructed his police chief to find immigrants who could fit the description of Islamic terrorists. The kidnapped men were then taken outside Skopje and gunned down. TV footage showed the dead men with pistols stuck in their waistbands as the public in FYR and the rest of the world [were] told they died after ambushing a police patrol.”
In Thompson’s report, Burney is recorded saying the Pakistani men “left for European countries in search of a better future. The police took them outside the US embassy in the capital Skopje, and brutally murdered them in a fake encounter and told the world that they were a terrorist, trained in Pakistani camps and had planned to strike American and European interests.”
Pakistan demanded an official apology — which it received from FYR’s government in May of 2004 — along with justice for the families of the six men. This is when Ansar Burney Trust International prepared to file a lawsuit against the The Former Yugoslav government in the International Court of Justice in The Hague (Netherlands) — the principal judicial organ of the United Nations.
“We will sue the government for $12 million,” a figure that represented $2 million per Pakistani family, Burney told the Associated Press. Burney identified the Pakistani men as Umar Farooq, Syed Bilal Husain Shah, Mohammed Asif Javed, Khalid Iqbal, Ejaz Ahmad Qureshi and Muhammad Riaz.
According to a BBC report on this trial, Boskovski, was originally charged as the main organizer of the plot and had fled to Croatia, where he was arrested and detained. The prosecutor in Croatia was reported saying Boskovski was charged with “having orchestrated and carried out the murder of seven economic immigrants in order to prove to the US that FYR was participating in the international war on terrorism.”
On March 14, 2004, three weeks after being charged in Croatia, Boskovski was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at the Hague. The Croatian authorities turned him over to the ICTY where he has been detained during pre-trial deliberations. Boskovski’s case marks the final indictment of the Tribunal, where Boskovski is currently being tried for the murders of Albanian civilians during a 2001 Macedonia conflict. The trial began April 16 this year (2007) and Ansar Burney Trust litigation is still pending.
Truth, like life always find a way. Especially when it comes to the Former Yugoslav province.
HellenesOnline | 28 / 06 / 2008 | INTERNATIONAL | Tags: Balkans, FYROM |
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