About 1,300 people were evacuated this Sunday to ensure the removal of a bomb dropped by NATO in 1999 in Nis, southeast Serbia, an interior ministry source said.
The thousand-kilogram bomb, which failed to explode, was removed from the construction site.
“It is being transported to a safe location for destruction,” Luka Kausic of the Interior Ministry told reporters, noting that the bomb was defused with the support of police, firefighters and a medical team.
According to Kausik, the MK84 bomb had an explosive charge of 430 kilograms.
NATO’s bombing of Serbia in the spring of 1999, designed to end Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic’s repression of Albanian separatists in Kosovo, lasted 78 days.
On May 7, 1999, at least 15 people were killed when NATO planes dropped cluster bombs on an open market in Niš.
The explosion was later called a mistake.
Serbia’s third city was bombed again five days later on 12 May, killing 11 civilians.
The conflict in Kosovo, marked by atrocities and a campaign of ethnic cleansing orchestrated from Belgrade, is the latest bloody chapter in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.
As a result, more than 13,000 people, mostly Albanians, died and hundreds of thousands became refugees.
According to a report by the NGO Human Rights Watch published in 2000, NATO attacks killed approximately 500 Serb and Kosovo Albanian civilians.