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Belgrade Higher Court. Photo: BIRN.

Witness Sani Uka told Belgrade Higher Court on Monday that a Serbian soldier killed three of his neighbours in his barn during an attack in May 1999 on the village of Zahaq/Zahac, near Cuska/Qushk, while another took around 1,400 Deutschmarks from him.

“The two soldiers came… One of them approached me and said – I’m only interested in the money, do you have any cash?” Uka told the court.

He said that the first soldier took around 1,400 Deutschmarks from him, and the second led four of his neighbours into the barn, released one of them, but killed the others and set the building on fire.

Apart from the two soldiers on his street, Uka said he saw around 15 more in the centre of the village.

He said that the remaining villagers left for Albania, but Serbian police at the entrance to the town of Pec/Peja turned them back.

From there, Uka said they went to Cuska/Qushk, where the local police commander told them not to leave the village until he said so.

“We heard a round of gunfire and screaming… We realised they were killing some people,” he said.

The Serbian prosecution accuses 11 former members of the 177th Yugoslav Army Unit with committing war crimes in the Kosovo villages of Cuska, Pavljan, Zahac and Ljubenic in spring 1999.

The group was initially convicted in 2014 and sentenced to a total of 106 years in jail for killing at least 118 Kosovo Albanian civilians.

But the Serbian appeals court reversed the verdict in 2015 and sent the case for a retrial.

The trial is considered to be one of the largest ever cases relating to Kosovo war crimes in the Belgrade courts.

But from its outset, it has been marked by delays and the refusal of witnesses to come to Belgrade to testify.

Two of the defendants, Milojko Nikolic and Radoslav Brnovic, have passed away during the trial.

The next hearing is scheduled for June 27.

In 2014, the Serbian war crimes prosecution also launched an investigation into general Dragan Zivanovic, former commander of the Yugoslav Army’s 125th Brigade, for allegedly doing nothing to prevent the crimes, but the probe was shut down.

BIRN investigated the killings in its documentary film ‘The Unidentified’, which revealed the scale of the crimes committed in the four Kosovo villages in 1999, while also uncovering the command structure of the police and army units that were involved.

Read more:

Kosovo Witnesses: Serbian Fighters Burned Homes, Killed Villagers



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