Serbia calls off mass grave hunt, for now

MITROVICA, Serbia, June 8 (Reuters) Serbia today called off a search for victims of the 1998-99 Kosovo war at a suspected mass grave site, saying nothing had been found in four days of digging.

But officials said investigators might shift their attention to other parts of the abandoned quarry on the boundary between Serbia and its UN-run southern province.

The dig began on Tuesday on the basis of witness testimony that four truckloads of corpses, believed to be ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, had been dumped at the site on a single day in June 1999, during NATO's bombing of Serbia.

Before work began, a senior Serbian official told Reuters that remote sensing indicated ''between 300 and 500 bodies'' were buried under sand and rock. A spokesman for the special war crimes prosecutor also said there were at least 350 corpses.

But the head of the Serbian Commission for Missing Persons, Veljko Odalovic, said today: ''We can confirm that there is no mass grave on the site.'' A senior police official, who asked not to be named, said the search might continue.

''It doesn't mean that there is not a mass grave nearby, and that we are not going to start work on an exhumation at another location in the quarry,'' he told Reuters.

An international official from the Kosovo-based Office for Missing Persons and Forensics also would not rule out further investigation at the quarry, Serbian news agencies reported.

Around 10,000 ethnic Albanians died in Serbia's 1998-99 war against separatist guerrillas in Kosovo. NATO bombed for 11 weeks to drive out Serb forces, and the UN took control. More than 2,000 people are still missing, the majority Albanians.

The remains of more than 800 Kosovo Albanians were found in 2001 at two sites in Serbia, trucked hundreds of kilometres north in a systematic attempt to hide evidence of atrocities as NATO wrested control of Kosovo from Serbia.

The 90-percent Albanian majority demands independence, but world powers remain deadlocked on a UN resolution the West hopes will open the door to statehood but which Russia opposes.

REUTERS SBC RK2130