immigrants he falsely accused of being terrorists to show solidarity with the U.S.-led war on terror.
Macedonian police said Saturday that former Minister Ljube Boskovski and three top associates as well as two special police commandos and a businessman were involved in the March 2002 killings of the Pakistani men.
"The special police lured the illegal Pakistanis immigrants into Macedonia from Bulgaria in March 2002, housed them, and then coldly gunned them down near the capital Skopje," Macedonian police spokeswoman Mirjana Konteska was quoted as saying. She said they were transported to the Rastanski Lozja area, about 5km north of Skopje, where they were surrounded and gunned down by police. "They lost their lives in a staged murder," she told the Associated Press (AP) news agency.
The Macedonian interior ministry claimed at the time that the Pakistani men opened fire on a police patrol with machine guns as part of plans to attack vital installations and embassies. However soon after questions were raised about the authorities’ versions of the events at a time when Minister Boskovski was reportedly investigated for war crimes by the United Nations Tribunal in the Hague.
PLOT TO KILL
Officials now say the killings "were in fact executions" as part of a plot to promote the Balkan country as a player in the fight against global terrorism. The bodies of the dead men were reportedly filmed with handguns stuck in their waistbands. Macedonia has been a close ally of the U.S led war on terror, but the State Department was reported as saying that the United States had pressed for an inquiry, AP reported.
The allegations have lead to new ethnic tension in the volatile Balkan nation. A party representing Mecedonia’s ethnic Albanian minority says Boskovski wanted to link Albanian rebels fighting for more rights in 2001 to terrorist groups such as Al-Qaida. The six months conflict ended when late President Boris Trajkovski, a former Methodist preacher, used his pragmatic style to supervise a peace accord. Trajkovski was killed in a plane crash earlier this year.
Ethnic Albanian politicians have always denied that the rebels co-operated with Islamic militant organizations. Former Minister Boskovski has denied any wrongdoing, but if proven, he and the other suspects could face between 10 years and life in prison. Pakistan has condemned the killings and demanded compensation and justice.
