Barbarism was "a matter of routine"

Pornography, drugs and the tools of torture are found in a Serbian police station, where teenagers were among the victims.

By Laura Rozen

Jun 18, 1999 | The most horrifying of the many appalling tortures that went on in the Serbian police station center on Cacak Street in central Pristina is suggested by a bed, with leather straps, its ratty yellow sponge mattress plunged through with bayonet and bullet holes, and the clothes of its victims piled onto the wet floor in the corner.

The bed is in one of three dank, dark dungeon-like cells in the basement of this house of torture, where Kosovo Albanians, many of them only teenagers, were taken by the Serbian police to be interrogated.

In the next room sits a single chair next to a collection of wooden bludgeons, some with nicknames scrawled into them. A small wooden baseball bat-shaped club is engraved with "the mini." A larger one, studded, is nicknamed, in Serbian, "the mouth shutter." Next to them sits a wooden box filled with knuckle busters, chains, axes, hammers and a collection of dozens of knives: butterfly knives that flick open, daggers, a sword, bayonettes. Knives lie throughout the four-floor police station, in a former student dormitory that now reeks with the stench of the bonfire set by Serbian police to destroy evidence of their murderous crimes as British paratroops arrived to take custody of the station. But it also reeks of rotted flesh.

Scattered across the dungeon's floor are syringes, bloody rolls of gauze and vials and boxes of drugs, some still in their boxes with names such Nirypan, Torecan, Atrophin, which our military guide says are supposed to make the heart rate speed up. KFOR soldiers who discovered the torture devices say they also came across a collection of hardcore pornography that featured devils, werewolves and vampires torturing women.

"We were shocked," said Lt. Dave Blakeley, the British paratroop who took over the station from the Serbian police on Tuesday. "I was shocked when I saw the weapons. But I was most horrified by the bed, filled with bullet holes, with leather belts, next to the most violent pornography, that showed men dressed up like werewolves and vampires involved with women."

Upstairs, in the rooms the police used as offices and bunk rooms, are pinned pictures of naked women next to calendars with the Serbian saints. The ransacked offices are piled with the blue Serbian police uniforms the torturers left behind when NATO came three days ago. On the desks are still the bottles of tequila, vodka and gin the police apparently used to keep their spirits up during their torture sessions.

"The whole building gets to you," said British Capt. Andy Reeds, who escorted a journalist through the police station Friday evening. He kneels to flip through the partially burned remains of a log book the Serbian police used. which show the names of the poor souls brought to be interrogated here, along with dates and other notes on their fate. Most of the log books the police successfully burned, evinced by large piles of crumbling white ash near the offices.

But neighbors have told KFOR soldiers about seeing family members of those held at the police come away empty-handed after having inquired about what happened to their loved one. Some of the photos of those interrogated inside show them to be no more than children.

Next Page: Estimates of the murdered will have to be revised upwards

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