As Belgrade’s forces battled the KLA and NATO bombed Yugoslavia in an attempt to make Slobodan Milosevic end his military campaign, two refrigerator trucks were found in a lake and a river in different parts of Serbia.

After the war ended and Milosevic was overthrown in 2000, it would become clear that these trucks were full of the bodies of dead Kosovo Albanian civilians.

But in 1999, very few people knew about this. One of them, according to court verdicts, was Vlastimir Djordjevic.

When one of the trucks emerged from the Danube near the small town Tekija in eastern Serbia at the beginning of April 1999, it was Djordjevic who gave the instructions to remove the bodies and transport them for burial in the grounds of the police’s Special Anti-Terrorist Unit Centre in Batajnica, near Belgrade.

This, according to the appeal verdict in the Djordjevic trial, was an attempt to “conceal the discovery of the bodies, as well as their ethnicity and origin, and to obstruct any further investigation into the deaths of these individuals”.

Djordjevic admitted his involvement in the attempted cover-up but denied having knowledge of the actual killings.

“Yes, I was involved when trucks with bodies were coming to Batajnica, but I didn’t know when the crimes were committed,” he said.

“I didn’t confront those who tried to mask and hide the crimes and I didn’t take any measures to find those responsible for war crimes, which I was supposed to do,” he added.

Also in April 1999, local police discovered another truck containing dead bodies on the opposite side of the country, in Lake Perucac in western Serbia.

The bodies were then buried near the lake under Djordjevic’s supervision. He later admitted in court that he knew that doing this was illegal but did not launch an investigation into the crime.

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