Belgrade  - A group of 17 Kosovo Albanian former militants, charged with the murder, rape and torture of Serb civilians in 1999, went on trial Thursday before the Serbian war crimes court, Belgrade media reported.

Nine of the men were arrested late last year in southern Serbia near the border with Kosovo, a region where a majority of the population is of Albanian ethnicity. Eight other suspects escaped and are accused in absentia.

The men are accused of kidnapping 153 Serbs and killing and mutilating at least 80 of them in the eastern Kosovo town of Gnjilane, after which they have been named the Gnjilane group.

According to the charges, the men raped women and tortured prisoners by breaking their fingers, pulling out their nails and teeth, and piercing their tongues with knives.

To cover up their crimes, the insurgents allegedly dismembered the bodies with axes and chainsaws, put the parts in bags and threw them into rubbish bins and in a nearby lake.

The trial, which had been due to begin on Wednesday, began a day late because of "technical problems" relating to the Albanian translations of the charges, media reported.

Bruno Vekaric, the spokesman for the war crime prosecution, told Belgrade media Wednesday that the trial represented a "high risk" because of possible retaliations to Serbs. On the same day, European Union police in Kosovo arrested four Kosovo Serbs suspected of war crimes near Gnjilane.

The Kosovo Albanian majority declared independence from Serbia on February 2008, eight years after the Albanian separatist insurgency, which ended in the bombing of Serbia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo.

After the Serbian forces pulled out of Kosovo in 1999, members of the Gnjilane group launched revenge attacks against the Serb minority.  dpa