U.N. Tribunal Denies Sending Assassins to Yugoslavia

A M S T E R D A M, Netherlands, Aug. 1, 2000 -- 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.

The Dutch spokesman said the Foreign Ministry was investigating reports that the group was arrested as long as two weeks ago.

“We will continue our efforts and go to the [Yugoslav] Foreign Ministry to ask why we were not told earlier of their arrest,” the spokesman said.

He added that de Rie had done his military service in the army in 1989. “But he was an administrator, hardly a paratrooper.”

The Dutch Foreign Ministry named the others as Bas van Schaik, Sander Zeitsen and van Iersel. All are aged between 28 and 32.

“We are pretty sure that they are neither military nor involved in military things,” the spokesman said.

The United States has offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest of Milosevic, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who commanded Bosnian Serb forces during the 1992-95 conflict in Bosnia.

In the film shown to journalists in Belgrade, van Iersel said he knew Milosevic and Mladic were among those indicted. He said that if he met the Yugoslav leader he would have been put in a box on top of a car and driven out of the country.

‘These Are No Pros’

Military specialists appeared in the Dutch media this morning to say it was extremely unlikely that the four are professional militiamen.

If they were what the Yugoslavs claim they are — SAS-trained assassins — then they would never have told their plans, the experts argued. Those same specialists pointed out that Dutch mercenaries fought in Croatia, mostly on the Croatian side.

Most of them came from extreme right-wing organizations, they said.

They also pointed out that the $5 million bounty is for information — not for kidnapping, much less delivering a human head.

One NATO source was reported as dismissing the whole incident as “bizarre.”

The Dutch anti-fascist group Kakfa, which monitors rightist activity, believes the men could be former members of the ultra-right CP’86 group, which was ordered dismantled last year by a Dutch court. Like many other small skinhead groups, CP’86 played survival games on the weekends.

Like most other European countries, the Netherlands has its fringe groups of ultra-rightists and neo-Nazis — many of whom are also hardcore soccer hooligans. They

are closely monitored by the intelligence services.

A Milosevic Stunt?

In Belgrade, the opposition dismissed the arrests as a propaganda stunt.

“Matic is crazy about conspiracy theories,” said Bogdan Grubacic, editor of the independent English language newsletter VIP. He said the arrests are part of the propaganda war launched by the Milosevic regime ahead of early elections, scheduled for Sept. 24.

And the alleged location of the arrests, on the border to Montenegro, could serve the dual purpose of helping Milosevic to fuel his war of words with the smaller, anti-Milosevic partner in the Yugoslav federation.

The Milosevic regime says Montenegro is behind repeated assassinations. Montenegro, in return, regularly accuses Milosevic of sending his hit-men there.

Montenegro is boycotting the upcoming elections, saying the laws had been changed by the Yugoslav government to favor the re-election of Milosevic and his partners.

ABCNEWS.com’s Sue Masterman and Reuters contributed to this report.