An ethnic Albanian man was sentenced today to 40 years in prison for a 2001 bus bombing that killed 11 Serbs in one of Kosovo's worst single attacks since its 1998-99 war.
Florim Ejupi was convicted of planting and detonating a bomb that destroyed a bus carrying Serb pilgrims heading to the monastery town of Gracanica, minutes after the convoy entered Kosovo from Serbia proper.
"A massive explosion hit the first bus of the convoy carrying 57 ethnic Serb passengers," the UN mission administering Kosovo since the war said in a statement. "The bombing killed 11 civilians of Serbian ethnicity and injured 22 others."
Ejupi was convicted of 11 counts of murder and dozens of counts of attempted murder, as well as terrorism, causing general danger, racial and other discrimination and unlawful possession of explosives.
The sentence was handed down by a panel of three international judges.
The bombing was one of the worst in a spate of revenge attacks on minority Serbs after Nato bombs drove out Serb forces to halt the killing and ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanians in a two-year war against separatist guerrillas.
Ejupi was arrested but escaped from the US military base Bondsteel in Kosovo in April 2001. He was rearrested in Albania in 2004. He is also charged with the killing of a UN police officer and his ethnic Albanian colleague in 2004.
Kosovo, where 90 per cent of the two million people are ethnic Albanians, declared independence from Serbia in February, with the backing of the West.