[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 107 (Friday, July 27, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8338-S8339]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
MURDERS CANNOT GO UNPUNISHED
Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, the murder of American citizens
abroad is always a cause for concern, and I want to bring the attention
of my colleagues to the killings of the Bytyqi brothers from New York
City. Agron, Mehmet, and Yli were reportedly discovered in a mass grave
in Petrovo Selo, Serbia with their hands bound and gunshots wounds to
their chests.
This heinous crime should be of particular concern to all of us. Not
only were the Bytyqi brothers American citizens, but they were also of
Albanian origin. We know well the brutal treatment of Albanians in
Kosova and Serbia during the war. My heart goes out to all the victims
and their families.
I recently wrote to Attorney General John Ashcroft asking for the
Federal Bureau of Investigation to become involved in this case. Human
rights workers and investigators, including from the United Nations,
should assist in delivering justice to the Bytyqi family.
There are reports that the brothers were murdered by policemen. I
know my colleagues will agree that the murder of Americans overseas
cannot go unpunished. I will continue to closely follow developments in
this case--as well as the continued detention of political prisoners in
Serbian jails.
I ask that an article from the July 15th edition of the Washington
Post detailing this crime appear in the Record following my remarks.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Washington Post, July 15, 2001]
Three Americans Found in Serbian Mass Grave Site
(By R. Jeffrey Smith and Peter Fin)
Pristina, Yugoslavia, July 14--The three young American men
had their hands tied with wire. Their heads were covered by
black hoods, and they were dressed in civilian clothes. They
were each shot at close range, and their bodies were dumped
in a pit dug in the Yugoslav national forest near the Serbian
town of Petrovo Selo.
The men--all brothers of ethnic Albanian origin--had worked
with their father as painters and made pizzas on Long Island
before going to fight in the Kosovo war with the so-called
Atlantic Brigade, a group of about 400 Albanian Americans who
volunteered to join the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army. But
they disappeared into a Serbian prison 17 days after the end
of NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, when
hostilities had ceased.
For nearly two years, neither their family nor the U.S.
government was able to learn their whereabouts. Then, last
week, their bodies were discovered in a mass grave by Serbian
police investigators. Together with officials of a Belgrade-
based human rights group, the police have begun to assemble a
picture of how the men, born in Illinois, lost their lives
during the violence that raged in and around the Serbian
province of Kosovo in the spring and summer of 1999.
Serbian officials and others monitoring the probe say the
three--Ylli, Agron and Mehmet Bytyqi, ethnic Albanians ages
24, 23 and 21 at the time of their death--appear to have been
murdered by policemen. Their bodies were placed in the grave
with 13 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, not far from a special
police training center 120 miles east of the capital of
Belgrade. A second grave nearby contains 59 bodies, and
investigators suspect they will find many other sites as they
begin to probe the forest more carefully.
The Bytyqis are the first Americans to turn up in a Serbian
mass grave. ``Believe me, this is going to be a very
important case for us,'' the U.S. chief of mission in
Yugoslavia, William Montgomery, said in a telephone
interview. ``We need to get real information from the
Yugoslav authorities. We are going to insist they do a full
investigation.''
Montgomery said he and other U.S. officials had sought
information about the Bytyqis from the Yugoslav Foreign
Ministry several times since Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic was ousted in October, but the ministry
acknowledged only that the brothers had been imprisoned after
the war ended.
Circumstantial evidence unearthed so far raises the
possibility of a revenge slaying by policemen, possibly
motivated by anger over the leading role that the United
States played in pressing for Western intervention in Kosovo
to halt human rights abuses committed by Yugoslav security
forces against Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority.
``They were killed because they were American citizens,''
said Bajram Krasniqi, a lawyer in Pristina, Kosovo's
provincial capital, retained by the Bytyqi family to press
for information about the case. ``There were people in that
prison who were in [the rebel army] . . . and they were
eventually released. This is the only case where someone was
arrested, taken to court, tried, released out of the prison
and then executed.
``This crime was planned, ordered and conducted without any
judicial act and it was done by Serbian officials in
cooperation with officials at the prison,'' Krasniqi said.
``Hopefully, the Serb authorities will now arrest these
people and they will be brought to justice.''
The men's mother, Bahrije Bytyqi, and their father, Ahmet
Bytyqi, had moved their family from Illinois to Kosovo in
1979 and later separated. Ahmet moved to New York and Ylli,
Agron and Mehmet joined him one at a time when each turned
age 17.
Bahrije was expelled from Kosovo during the war by security
forces but later returned to the southern Kosovo city of
Prizren. She has been distraught and sedated since learning
last week of the discovery of her sons' bodies in Serbia, and
could not be interviewed today. When her 22-year old son,
Fatos, a resident of Prizren, was interviewed today, he
initially lied about his brothers' wartime activities, later
explaining he had been ``advised'' not to discuss their
membership in the Atlantic Brigade.
But members of the brigade interviewed in New York said
that the brothers had been enthusiastic--if naive--volunteers
in the unit. They had different personalities: Ylli was
quiet, Agron an outgoing partier, Mehmet a hard worker. But
all three left New York on the brigade's charter flight in
the spring of 1999 and tried to join the same rebel unit--
only to be told by rebel leaders that they had to fight
separately.
``They had that youthfulness that exploded in their
faces,'' said fellow rebel Arber Muriqui in New York.
In mid-June 1999, when NATO forces deployed inside Kosovo
to police a cease-fire, the brothers escorted their mother
back into the province. Roughly two weeks later, the brothers
told Fatos they were going to Pristina. Their mission, he
said, was to visit some ethnic Albanian friends from New York
who had fought with the Atlantic Brigade.
Amid the postwar chaos--and seething tensions between
ethnic Serbs and Albanians--they headed north in a Volkswagen
Golf on June 26. An ethnic Roma neighbor of Bahrije's,
Miroslav Mitrovic, has told the Belgrade-based Humanitarian
Law Center, an independent group, that the three brothers
offered him and two other Romas a ride out of Prizren and
into southern Serbia, but Fatos says the brothers never
mentioned the plan and he cannot confirm the tale.
[[Page S8339]]
There is a dispute between Fatos and Mitrovic over why the
brothers did not have their U.S. passports with them on the
journey; in any event, Fatos and the family lawyer say, the
brothers carried other identification that clearly indicated
they were American residents, including New York state
driver's licenses. Around their necks, he said, were
medallions bearing the seal of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
The brothers were detained at a Serbian checkpoint in the
village of Merdare; the Romas were allowed to proceed,
Mitrovic told the law center. A magistrate in the nearby town
of Kursumlija sentenced them to at least 15 days in jail for
illegally crossing the border between Serbia and Kosovo, a
Serbian province. The next day--June 27--they were
transferred to a prison in Prokuplje, in southern Serbia.
There, according to documents and testimony obtained by the
law center, the three brothers were interviewed by a police
inspector named Zoran Stakovic, whose specialty was cases
involving foreign citizens. Four days before the end of their
sentence. Stankovic came to the prison and told the warden to
release them into his custody, the law center said it had
learned.
Fatos said he was told by a prison official, whom the
family bribed for information four months ago, that the three
brothers were taken to the back door of the prison and handed
over to two plainclothes police in the company of the
uniformed patrolmen. They were driven away in the company of
the uniformed patrolmen. They were driven away in a white car
and never seen alive again.
Their family became so desperate that at one point they
persuaded their lawyer, Krasniqui, to write a letter to
Miloservic, pleading for information about her sons; their
mother also went to the prison in Serbia to demand answers.
``They were very hopeful that the boys would return because
once they were in prison, Serb authorities would be aware
that they are American citizens,'' and Marin Vulaj, vice
chairman of the National Albanian American Council.
The law center made inquiries in August, September and
October 1999, after Mitrovic contacted the center to express
his own concern, but only received a copy of the brothers'
prison release order.
``I was hoping they were alive,'' Fatos said. ``We were
very shocked. We had no idea how they could have gotten'' to
the mass grave site in Petrovo Selo. In a statement issued on
Saturday, the law center demanded that the Serbian government
``tell the mother the truth.''
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