An international tribunal on Thursday jailed a top Kosovo Serb politician for nine years for war crimes against ethnic Albanians during the late 1990s conflict, in a ruling condemned by Belgrade.

Oliver Ivanovic, 62, was found guilty of encouraging the killings in April 1999 of captured civilians in the northern city of Kosovska Mitrovica, by telling Serb paramilitaries at a checkpoint to "ask nothing and carry out orders". Four of the prisoners were subsequently killed.

"Oliver Ivanovic knew that an operation of expulsions and killings of (ethnic) Albanians was under way in Kosovska Mitrovica and knew that murders would follow," said tribunal president Roxana Comsa, reading the verdict.

"He encouraged paramilitaries to commit this crime," she said.

He and four others were acquitted of other alleged war crimes in 2000.

The 1998-1999 war pitted ethnic Albanian guerrillas seeking independence for the southern Serbian province of Kosovo against Serbia's forces, who withdrew from the territory after an 11-week NATO bombing campaign.

Kosovo, whose population is predominantly ethnic Albanian, unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in 2008, a move not recognised by Belgrade.

Ivanovic, who is considered a political moderate, became the first senior Kosovo Serb official to be charged and tried by the European Union Rule of Law Mission (EULEX) on suspicion of war crimes against ethnic Albanians.

Top Serbian officials in Belgrade qualified the court ruling as "scandalous".

"The verdict has nothing to do with law and justice," said Marko Djuric, head of the government office for Kosovo, while Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Rasim Ljajic said he believed the verdict was "politically motivated".

"By no means can I relate him with such a crime or so draconian punishment," Ljajic was quoted as saying by Beta news agency.

Ivanovic's lawyer said his client would launch an appeal, while families of the victims expressed satisfaction over the verdict.

A former Serbian state secretary for Kosovo, Ivanovic was a key interlocutor with NATO, the UN and later the EU after the war and was seen as backing dialogue with Kosovo's ethnic Albanian community.

Arrested in January 2014, he pleaded not guilty to the charges and has held hunger strikes in protest. He leads a Serb political party in northern Kosovo, where he lived before his arrest.

EULEX, the EU's police and justice mission in the region, has the power to step in and take on cases that the local judiciary and police are unable to handle because of their sensitive nature.

About 120,000 of Kosovo's 1.8 million inhabitants are ethnic Serbs.
Source :AFP