Nato officer held in Yugoslav spy hunt

A FRENCH military officer assigned to Nato has been taken into custody in Paris on suspicion he spied for Yugoslavia, the Defence Ministry said yesterday.

Pierre Bunel, an army officer, was suspected of giving Belgrade secret documents on planned Nato air-strikes in the event that a diplomatic solution was not found to the Kosovo crisis, a ministry official said.

Sources said that Mr Bunel was assigned to Nato headquarters in Brussels at the time the documents allegedly were passed to Yugoslavia. They said he had admitted handing over the information.

The documents allegedly listed targets to be hit by Nato aircraft if the Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, refused to meet United Nations demands to pull his forces out of Kosovo and begin autonomy talks with the ethnic Albanian majority in the province. (Reuters)