BELGRADE, Sept 7 (AFP) - Serbian police have launched an investigation into an ally of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic suspected of destroying or hiding military and police reports from the Kosovo war, radio B92 reported Tuesday.
Former Yugoslav cabinet chief Goran Milinovic was suspected of "having destroyed or hidden some 160 documents of the joint command of the Serbian police and Yugoslav army deployed in Kosovo in 1998," the report quoted police as saying.
The documents related to the bloody conflict between Belgrade security forces and independence-seeking ethnic Albanians in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, the subject of several war crimes trials at the UN tribunal at The Hague.
According to the police, Milinovic received almost 1,500 pages of police and army reports from Kosovo on November 2, 1998.
"We could not find these documents at all. In the end it turned out that they had gone missing unexplainably," Human Rights Minister Rasim Ljajic said.
Ljajic, who is also the chairman of the national council for cooperation with the UN war crimes court, told the radio that the investigation would be a "concrete sign of our readiness to cooperate with the tribunal."
Milinovic has stayed out of politics since Milosevic's arrest for alleged corruption in April 2001. Two months later Milosevic was extradited to The Hague where is still on trial for war crimes and genocide.
Milosevic faces a life sentence if convicted.