Dutchmen Arrested for Alleged Attempt on Milosevic

B E L G R A D E, Yugoslavia, July 31, 2000 -- Yugoslavia announced today that it has arrested four Dutchmen who were planning to kidnap or kill President Slobodan Milosevic.

Information Minister Goran Matic said the men were posing as amateur “weekend warriors,” but were in fact assassins sent by Western intelligence agencies to deliver a “Serbian head” to President Clinton at the July G-8 summit in Japan.

“They were arrested just before the Okinawa summit,” Matic said. “Their task was to make a present to the U.S. delegation.”

A Dutch official confirmed the identity of one of the men shown giving a video confession, and the fact that he had once been in the army as a conscript, but said he had left the service 10 years ago.

Matic 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 where a man speaking in English with a Dutch accent gave his name as Johannes van Iersel; the man was telling an unidentified questioner that he and his friends had been looking for people indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Washington has offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest of Milosevic, Ratko Mladic, who commanded Bosnian Serb forces during the 1992-1995 conflict in Bosnia, and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

Van Iersel said he knew Milosevic and Mladic were among those indicted. Asked about Milosevic, he said: “In case we meet him … I need to put him in a ski box ontop of the car and drive him out of the country.”

Milosevic’s ‘Head in a Box’

One of the other members of the group had a different plan, Van Iersel said, which was “to kidnap and to kill the president, and to decapitate his head and put it in a box and send it home.”

“We have all got normal jobs in our life and on weekends we like to change into uniforms,” he said, adding that there were several such groups.

The film also showed uniforms and equipment Matic said had been found with the men, including an SAS Survival Guide widely available in British bookshops.

Matic said the men had been trained by British special forces, which, he said, had also been involved in training police in the pro-Western Yugoslav republic of Montenegro.

The Dutch Defense Ministry confirmed that one of the men shown and named as Gotfrides de Rie was a former member of the Dutch military as he had said on the video.

“He was a conscript, he did his military service for one year and left in August 1990. He’s not in the military at the moment. We have no idea what he’s doing now. It’s none of our business,” said ministry spokesman Hendrik Schonau.

He said the ministry had been unable to identify the other members of the group. “We are not certain they were in military service, and the names are spelt very strangely, so it’s difficult to trace them,” Schonau said.

The Dutch embassy in Belgrade said it had been given no information by the authorities.

“We have asked the foreign ministry if they can confirm this story,” said Second Secretary Paul van Oostveen, adding that the ministry has yet to come back with an answer.

Accusing the West

The Yugoslav government, blamed by its opponents for some mysterious murders of public figures this year, regularly accuses Western spies of plotting assassination, singling out French and Americans so far.

Western officials have made it clear they would like to see Milosevic ousted, but they have denied any attempt to assassinate him or any other official.

Matic, whose regular news conferences appear designed to counter Western charges against Milosevic and reinforce the government’s message to Serbs that the West is undemocratic and hypocritical, said the Dutchmen were not merely bounty hunters.

“These are not weekend warriors, these are people who are deeply involved in military and intelligence services,” he said, adding that Yugoslavia has shown it can thwart all such attempts at “international terrorism.”

“Their attempt to take a Serbian head and bring it to Okinawa also failed.”