UN police charge five Kosovo Albanian men with war crimes

United Nations police arrested five Kosovo Albanian men Monday on charges they had committed war crimes during the 1999 conflict in the region, the UN mission in the province said today.

A spokesman for the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) told a press briefing in Pristina that police arrested the men in the town of Kacanik early Monday. Their names have not been released.

Spokesman Neeraj Singh said the five have been charged with "war crimes-related charges, which relates to actions against (the) civilian population during the armed conflict of 1999, and details of that we cannot disclose until we have further information from the investigation."

The spokesman said the operation to arrest and charge the men was led by the Kosovo Department of Justice's Central Criminal Investigation Unit, and was not related to investigations being conducted by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which is based in The Hague, the Netherlands.