A SERBIAN court has sentenced four former members of the notorious Scorpions paramilitary unit to 15 to 20 years in jail for murdering 14 Kosovo Albanian civilians in 1999.
The men were convicted after testimony from a former Scorpion and from several children who survived the massacre described how the accused rounded up 19 people in the yard of a house in the Kosovo town of Podujevo and strafed them with bullets.
The dead included elderly people, women and children, the youngest of whom was less than two years old. Five children survived with serious injuries after a regular Serb military unit arrived on the scene and interrupted the massacre.
“Zeljko Djukic, Dragan Medic and Dragan Borojevic were sentenced to 20 years in prison while Miodrag Solaja was sentenced to 15 years in prison as the court determined he was under 18 when he committed the crime,” said court spokeswoman Ivana Ramic.
Another former Scorpion, Sasa Cvjetan, was sentenced in 2005 to 20 years in jail for involvement in the atrocity.
“This verdict shows that there are no untouchables in Serbia. All those who committed war crimes must face justice,” said Bruno Vekaric, a spokesman for Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor.
“With this verdict Serbia has shown that it is ready to repair bad things from its past.”
The Scorpions were one of the most infamous of several paramilitary groups established under former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, and gained particular notoriety from video footage made by a Scorpion of his comrades executing six Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995.
Four ex-Scorpions were sentenced to a total of 58 years in jail for those murders in 2007.
The lawyer for the men convicted yesterday said he would appeal the verdict.
