WASHINGTON (voa) – The United States has expressed its outrage to the Yugoslav government over the detention Thursday of a U.S. diplomat by military police in Belgrade.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Friday the diplomat was having dinner at a Belgrade restaurant with Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Momcilo Perisic when Yugoslav military police burst in and detained both men. U.S. Officials in Washington identified the diplomat as a U.S. embassy first secretary, John David Neighbor.
Mr. Boucher said the military police roughed up and pushed around the U.S. diplomat and held him for about 15 hours without allowing him to contact the embassy before freeing him.
He said the policemen were not in uniform and presented no identification when they accosted the U.S. diplomat and later subjected him to interrogation.
The U.S. spokesman called the detention of Mr. Perisic an attack on an elected Serbian civilian government official. He said the United States is forcefully protesting this to the Yugoslav government.
News reports from Belgrade quoted Yugoslav security sources as saying Mr. Perisic was detained on suspicion of espionage. Yugoslav military authorities have not freed Mr. Perisic, a Yugoslav army general and former Armed Forces Chief of Staff.
Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic called the arrests a first-rate scandal.
Other top leaders of the Yugoslav and Serbian governments said the detentions harm the reputation of Yugoslavia. They said the manner of the detentions has cast doubts on whether the country’s military services are under civilian control. The comments came in a statement issued after a joint meeting called to review the situation.
General Perisic founded an opposition party, the Movement for a Democratic Serbia, which joined the Yugoslav Republic’s coalition government after the ouster of Mr. Milosevic. He was named a Serbian deputy prime minister in January of last year.
