Serbs blew up, shelled and set fire to over a third of Kosovo's mosques in a crackdown against the province's majority Muslims in 1998-99, Mr Slobodan Milosevic's trial was told today.
About 225 of Kosovo's 607 mosques were damaged or destroyed during a Serb offensive in the disputed province, Harvard University art documentation specialist Mr Andras Riedlmayer said in a report presented at the Hague war crimes tribunal.
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Mr Slobodan Milosevic
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"In some contexts, mosques and other Islamic architectural heritage were the only buildings in a neighbourhood that had been singled out for attack," according to the Harvard-backed report presented in evidence by the trial's 22nd witness.
Images of shattered minarets and churches from the Balkan region with its rich religious and culture heritage spanning centuries of Christian and Muslim co-existence shocked the outside world and helped to prompt Western intervention.
Former Yugoslav president Mr Milosevic, who has been in detention in The Hague since last June, is facing charges including genocide and crimes against humanity in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s at the United Nations tribunal.
He is accused of spearheading the deportation of 800,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo in 1999 after almost a decade of tensions between its majority Albanian population and Belgrade boiled over.
Mr Milosevic's trial, which started on February 12th, resumed in the Hague yesterday after a three-week adjournment.