U.N. Tribunal Denies Sending Assassins to Yugoslavia

A M S T E R D A M, Netherlands, Aug. 1 -- The International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia today strongly denied links to a group of Dutchmen being held in Serbia on suspicion of plotting to assassinate Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Yugoslavia said Monday it had arrested four Dutchmen, allegedly sent by Western intelligence agencies, who were planning to kidnap Milosevic and other alleged war criminals indicted by The Hague tribunal.

“I would call it pretty good fiction,” said Paul Risley, spokesman for the tribunal. “This story is fiction and nothing more.”

With pictures of the four and their alleged cache of weapons spread across most Dutch newspapers, the Dutch government raised the tempo of its own denials and said it was trying to find out more about the incident.

“We deny any military operation,” said a Dutch Foreign Ministry spokesman. He said Dutch diplomats were trying to make contact with their Yugoslav counterparts in The Hague and in Belgrade to find out more about the incident.

Friends and colleagues of one of those detained, Godfried de Rie, reacted to the news with shock.

“He is a dead honest, hardworking man who never planned to kidnap President Milosevic,” Jaap Havik, the owner of a Mercedes restoration firm that employed de Rie, told Dutch television. “He’s always working on cars and motorbikes.”

A next-door neighbor of de Rie’s described him as a perfectly normal person who once worked as a postman.

‘Weekend Warriors’

Yugoslav Information Minister Goran Matic said the men were posing as amateur “weekend warriors” but were in fact assassins sent by the West.

He said the men had been caught in Mehov Krs, an isolated corner of Serbia near Kosovo and Montenegro, about 300 miles south of Belgrade.

Matic showed a film in which one of the four, identified as Jeroen van Iersel, told an unidentified questioner that he and his friends had been looking for people indicted by the U.N. tribunal.