Serb journalist jailed for spying

Mr Filipovic wrote about alleged atrocities in Kosovo

Award-winning Serbian journalist Miroslav Filipovic has been sentenced by a military court to seven years in jail for spying and spreading false information.

The case centred on articles Mr Filipovic wrote about alleged atrocities committed by Yugoslav troops in Kosovo last year.

We will do everything we can to ensure that this shameful verdict is quashed as soon as possible

Danas chief editor Grujica Spasovic

The court ruled that he had gathered confidential military information for foreign organisations.

Mr Filipovic, 49, wrote for the independent Belgrade daily newspaper Danas, the French news agency AFP and the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR).

The stories published on the IWPR website formed the basis of the spying charges against him.

Serb forces torched many homes in Kosovo before they left

He had also produced features on the Yugoslav security services, alleged police repression and a protest by Yugoslav army reservists.

He was sentenced to five years' imprisonment for spying, and a further two years for "spreading false information," the court said.

Mr Filipovic, who was arrested in May, denied all the charges during the one-day hearing on Tuesday in the southern Serbian city of Nis.

He has a right to appeal.

International support

Since being detained, Mr Filipovic has been named European Internet Journalist of the Year.

An extremely harsh verdict handed down purely to intimidate the media

Defence lawyer Zoran Stojanovic

The trial was strongly condemned by Amnesty International and other human rights bodies.

"Rather than persecute Miroslav Filipovic for his work as a journalist, the Yugoslav authorities should investigate the allegations made in his articles," Amnesty International said in a statement on Monday.

The chief editor of Danas, Grujica Spasovic, condemned the verdict against his colleague.

"All of us in the editorial office are shocked by the verdict... We will do everything we can to ensure that this shameful verdict is quashed as soon as possible," he told independent Belgrade-based Radio B2-92.

Alleged atrocities

Prosecutors told the court that Mr Filipovic's articles and notebooks provided proof that he had gathered secret information between May 1999 and May 2000.

They said the information he published on alleged massacres of ethnic Albanian civilians, random shelling of villages and looting by Serb troops and paramilitaries in the southern Serbian province was false.

Mr Filipovic's reports included testimony from a Yugoslav army commander who admitted that he watched as a soldier decapitated a three-year-old ethnic Albanian boy in front of his family.

Another report described how tanks in the commander's unit indiscriminately shelled a Kosovo Albanian village before paramilitary police moved in and massacred the survivors.

One of Mr Filipovic's three defence lawyers, Zoran Stojanovic, told the Associated Press that it was "an extremely harsh verdict handed down purely to intimidate the media".