Serbia's war crimes prosecutor has brought charges against four former paramilitary fighters for a massacre of ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovo in 1999, the prosecutor's office said Monday.
The four former members of the notorious Scorpions unit were charged with gunning down a group of 19 civilians, including women, children and the elderly, said the prosecutor's statement.
The killings in the northern town of Podujevo are considered to be one of the worst crimes of Kosovo's 1998-99 war. Only five children survived the massacre.
It took place in March 1999, at the start of the NATO bombing which eventually halted the Serb crackdown against Kosovo's ethnic Albanian separatists and forced the Serb troops out.
Kosovo has been ruled by the United Nations and NATO since 1999. It declared independence from Serbia in February.
Another former Scorpions member, Sasa Cvjetan, was also convicted of the Podujevo killings in 2004, and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The Serbian war crimes prosecutor's office said that the five children in Podujevo stayed alive thanks to the help of regular Serbian special police units who arrived at the scene.
The four paramilitaries were arrested last year. They were identified as Zeljko Djukich, Dragan Medich, Dragan Borojevich and Miodrag Solaja.
Three more Scorpions were put on trial separately after a video was aired in Serbia in 2005 showing the execution of a group of Muslim civilians from Srebrenica by the Scorpions fighters.
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