-
- LONDON (Reuters) - NATO deliberately
bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade after the Western alliance
discovered
the mission was being used to transmit Yugoslav military
communications,
a British newspaper reported Sunday.
-
- An official at NATO
headquarters in Brussels denied the
Observer newspaper's report but it
is likely to rekindle diplomatic tensions
on the eve of a visit by
Chinese President Jiang Zemin to alliance hawk
Britain this
week.
-
- The
Observer quoted an unnamed intelligence officer as
saying ``NATO had
been hunting the radio transmitters in Belgrade,'' including
one at
President Slobodan Milosevic's house, during its air war against
Yugoslavia.
-
- ``When the president's residence was bombed on 23 April,
the
signals disappeared for 24 hours,'' said the NATO officer, who monitored
Yugoslav broadcasts from neighboring Macedonia.
-
- ``When they came back on the
air again, we discovered
they came from the (Chinese) embassy
compound.''
-
- The three cruise missiles that slammed into the mission
on May
7 killed three Chinese and opened a diplomatic chasm between NATO
and
Beijing, which holds one of five permanent seats on the U.N. Security
Council.
-
- Senior U.S. and NATO officials blamed the attack on a
targeting
error caused by outdated maps.
-
- That explanation brought incredulity from Chinese
leaders
and the bombing sparked three days of government-backed
protests against
the U.S. and British embassies in Beijing.
-
- The Observer said it
had been told by a NATO flight control
officer in Naples that the
Chinese mission was correctly located on a map
of ``non-targets'' which
included churches, hospitals and embassies.
-
- It said the Chinese embassy had
been removed from the
list after NATO electronic intelligence detected
it was rebroadcasting
Yugoslav Army communications to units in the
field.
-
- The
Observer speculated the Chinese might have helped
Milosevic as a means
of gaining access to radar-evading technology aboard
a U.S. F-117
Stealth bomber that went down in Yugoslavia in the first few
days of
NATO's air campaign.
-
- ``The Chinese were also suspected of monitoring the
cruise
missile attacks on Belgrade, with a view to developing effective
countermeasures
against U.S. missiles,'' it said.
-
- The NATO official in Brussels
said of the Observer story,
written in cooperation with Denmark's
Politiken newspaper, ``as far as
I know is not true.''
-
- ``I can only go by
the statements that have been made
in Washington,'' he told
Reuters.
-
- A
spokesman at Britain's Ministry of Defense said the
story was not a new
one after ``wide speculation that it was a conspiracy,
even at the time
of the incident.''
-
- ``Apologies were given by the United Kingdom,'' he told
Reuters. ``In light of the Chinese visit next week, it is clearly muddying
the waters. I think they are throwing firecrackers in there.''
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