EmergencyNet NEWS Service-Saturday, April 17, 1999-09:40CDT 

CRISIS NEWS BRIEFS

ALBANIA (EmergencyNet News) - Thousands more Kosovo refugees streamed into northern Albania overnight, sending relief workers scrambling to find them food and shelter in a country already overwhelmed by the distraught human tide.

BELGIUM (EmergencyNet News) - A NATO official said on Saturday that bad weather forced NATO to cancel most of its planned air strikes on Yugoslavia overnight but alliance planes successfully hit several targets, including armor on the ground. He said: "Weather prevented us from going through with most of our planned missions but we did manage to conduct several more or less successful strikes."

SERBIA (EmergencyNet News) - The Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, remained under air-raid alert until early Saturday. Sirens in other cities across Serbia also warned of a 24th night of NATO attacks. An industrial plant in Valjevo in central Serbia was hit by four missiles early today.

Meanwhile, thousands of refugees were on the move Saturday in Yugoslavia, as Serb forces appeared to be making a final push to clear Kosovo of its ethnic Albanian population amid NATO airstrikes against Yugoslavia.

WASHINGTON (EmergencyNet News) - The United States said Friday it was holding a captured Yugoslav army officer, NATO's first prisoner of war since the alliance began air strikes against Serb forces last month. The Pentagon said in a statement: "Today he was flown on a U.S. helicopter from northern Albania to Tirana where he is currently under the control of U.S. military authorities."

From the ERRI Watch Center

BELGIUM (EmergencyNet News) - In what is being called a renewed exodus on Friday, thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees poured out of Kosovo. NATO on Friday also vowed to pursue air strikes against Yugoslavia for weeks or months if necessary.

The United States said Friday it was holding a captured Yugoslav army officer, NATO's first prisoner of war since the alliance began air strikes against Serb forces last month. The prisoner, a lieutenant about 20 years old, was captured by Kosovo Liberation Army forces during a night operation April 13-14. The officer was delivered to the Albanian government and was then turned over to U.S. custody.

The air raid siren in Belgrade went off later than usual at just after 2300 hours local time Friday and pictures from state television showed rainy conditions in the capital. Earlier, Yugoslavia's official news agency Tanjug said NATO had carried out about 25 strikes on targets around the Kosovo provincial capital of Pristina Friday evening, including the airport at Slatina and the nearby town of Lipljane.

Bad weather forced NATO to cancel most of its planned air strikes on Yugoslavia overnight but alliance planes successfully hit several targets, including armor on the ground. A NATO official said: "Weather prevented us from going through with most of our planned missions but we did manage to conduct several more or less successful strikes."

The official said NATO was expecting an improvement in the weather over Yugoslavia, which has dogged its 24-day-old campaign of air strikes. While low cloud has not prevented high-flying NATO planes from bombing strategic, fixed targets such as bridges and airfields, it has hampered low-altitude attacks on ground forces.

In Geneva, the United Nations refugee agency said Yugoslavia had resumed mass expulsions of ethnic Albanians "with full force" and seemed intent on driving all of them out of Kosovo. The spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said at least 12,000 people had fled the Serbian province into Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro in the space of 24 hours from Thursday to Friday morning.

France, meanwhile, said it planned to air-drop food and medicine to ethnic Albanians still inside Kosovo.

In Washington, the U.S. State Department said it had fresh evidence of mass killings in Kosovo and the destruction or damaging of more than 400 villages there by the forces of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

At the Yugoslav-Macedonian border a train disgorged some 3,000 ethnic Albanians Friday. They walked past minefields through a no-man's-land where some 45,000 earlier refugees were stuck for days as Macedonia hesitated to let them in.

Nearly 7,000 refugees poured into Albania from Kosovo and many more were expected as shelling continued further north along the border with Yugoslavia.

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