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NATO Links Weaponry Cache to KLA
NATO on Friday linked a large cache of weapons found last week to the Kosovo Liberation Army(KLA) . The weaponry cache included mortars, missiles, mines and machine guns.
Major Scott Slaten, a NATO spokesman, said that documents found at the cache site indicated that the weapons belonged to the Kosovo Liberation Army, according to reports from Pristina.
The documents contained names and other evidence as to ownership of the weapons and would be investigated by the United Nations, according to the major.
The weaponry stash was the largest found since the NATO-led multinational peacekeeping force entered the Yugoslav province in June last year.
The weapons were found on June 16 near Klecka, about 20 kilometers southwest of Pristina, the provincial capital.
Slaten said that there was no evidence that Agim Ceku, the former Kosovo Liberation Army commander who now heads the Kosovo Protection Corps, knew of the weaponry cache.
The Kosovo Protection Corps is an armed force set up by many former Kosovo Liberation Army members under the auspices of NATO and NATO-led peacekeepers.
If NATO established a link between Ceku and the weaponry cache, demand would arise to have the ethnic Albanian removed from the head position of the Kosovo Protection Corps.
Ceku himself denied knowledge of the weapons and he asserted that his troops had turned in all the weapons as called for by the Kosovo crisis settlement.
The weapons, stashed in several concrete bunkers near Ceku's former headquarters, included large quantities of mortars, anti- tank rocket launchers, missiles, mines, heavy machine guns and boxes of ammunition.
In September last year, NATO and NATO-led peacekeepers declared that the Kosovo Liberation Army had complied with the order to hand in all their weapons. On September 20, NATO agreed to reorganize the Kosovo Liberation Army into what became known as the Kosovo Protection Corps.
NATO officials suggested that some of the weapons could have been used in recent attacks against the ethnic Serbs in Kosovo.
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