BELGRADE, Dec 26 (Reuters) - Serbia on Friday arrested nine former Kosovo guerrilla fighters suspected of involvement in killings and abductions in the rebellious Serbian province of Kosovo in 1999, the office of the war crimes prosecutor said. "From June 1999 until October 1999, they were involved in at least 51 murders and 159 abductions in the town of Gnjilane in Kosovo," said Bruno Vekaric, a spokesman for Serbia's war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic. Vekaric said the nine are suspected of torturing, looting and raping Serb and non-Serb civilians in three locations in Gnjilane, close to the Serbian border. "They were all members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)," he said. The KLA waged guerrilla war against Serb forces in 1998-99. Serbia's brutal response, expelling hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian civilians, drew NATO into an 11-week bombing campaign to drive Serb forces out of Kosovo. The nine were arrested in the southern Serbian town of Presevo, near the border with Kosovo. The region was the site of an ethnic Albanian insurgency in 2001. "We have planned the action in the past four months," Vekaric said, adding that some of those arrested did not live in Serbia but came to spend New Year holidays with relatives. (Reporting by Ivana Sekularac, editing by Tim Pearce)
REFILE - CORRECTING IDENTITY OF SUBJECT Video frame grab shows former Rwanda Colonel Anatole Nsengiyumva listening to the verdict at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha December 18, ...
