EU SECURITY police stormed the offices of a Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) veterans’ association today to get hold of international prosecutors’ files from a war crimes investigation.

Members of the veterans’ association, which represents former ethnic Albanian separatists who fought Serbian troops in a 1998-99 war for independence, said that police from the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX) prevented them from going into the association’s offices. Officers also arrested association leader Hysni Gucati and said he would be transferred to The Hague, where a special court is looking into alleged KLA crimes during the 1999 Yugoslavia war.

Though the United States had recognised the KLA as a terrorist organisation because of its campaign of bombings in 1995-96 in the cause of separation from Yugoslavia, it later supported the group in its war against Slobodan Milosevic’s government in 1999. Both sides have been accused to conducting ethnic cleansing operations during that conflict.