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“The horror of Dubrava prison is a horror that I wish that no one will ever experience,” said one of the survivors of the May 1999 massacre, Bedri Kukalaj, who still has scars on his face and stomach from his wounds that day.

“It is something you can only see in horror movies,” Kukalaj told BIRN as he and other former inmates gathered at the prison to commemorate the 19th anniversary of the massacre.

During its air campaign against Slobodan Milosevic’s regime, NATO bombs struck the prison twice, on May 19 and 21; it was a target for the Western military alliance because Yugoslav Army and Serbian police force were based right next to the jail.

The day after the second NATO strike, around 1,000 prisoners were assembled on the prison’s sports field and Serbian police and prison guards opened fire and threw grenades at them. In the hours that followed, prisoners who had hidden themselves in various places inside the building were also hunted down and killed, according to eyewitness quoted in a Human Rights Watch report.

“We were ordered to line here [on the sports field] and were told that they were going to transfer us to any other prison due to security conditions,” Kukalaj recalled.

“When we were lined up, we were asked if we were prepared to be transferred and as soon as that speech ended, the shooting with the hand grenades started, they attacked us with very heavy weapons and 120 were killed in this place, around 300 were injured,” he added.

Another survivor, Uke Thaci, said that they heard the order coming from one of the prison’s observation towers to line up on the sports field. The prisoners were standing in four lines when they were attacked from all sides.

“We could not see each other for the dust from all the grenades that were thrown at the same time, within that time of five to ten minutes,” Thaci said.

Before the prison was bombed by NATO, a large number of inmates had been brought there from other prisons in Serbia.

Kukalaj believes that this shows that the killings were planned in advance: “They brought us here to massacre us,” he said.

He said thatsome Serbian prisoners also were given guns to shootethnic Albanian inmates.

In order to document the crime, Thaci worked for ten years to collect testimonies, documents and pictures from the Dubrava massacre, and published a 500-page book about it.

“I have also filed criminal charges with the prosecution in the Peja district and nothing has been done. EULEX [the EU’s rule-of-law mission in Kosovo] has gathered testimonies, but nothing,” he added.

The Dubrava jail is still operational; it is the largest in Kosovo. But where the prisoners were lined up before the shooting started in 1999, there are now trees growing that were planted by survivors, making a ‘living wall’ in memory of those who did not survive.

At the annual commemorations, the calls for justice continue because no one has yet been prosecuted for the killings.

“This massacre was a screenplay written by Serbia, and someone should take responsibility for what happened here,” Thaci said.