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Darko Tasin’s trial at Prizren Basic Court. Photo: BIRN.

“I saw how Darko Tasic started to loot the houses of the [ethnic Albanian] Hajdari family and burned them afterwards,” witness Bajram Zylfiu told Prizren Basic Court on Tuesday at the trial of ex-fighter Tasic, who is charged with war crimes.

Zylfiu, who survived the March 1999 killings in the village of Krusha e Vogel/Mala Krusha, said that 20 people survived out of 109 who were shot during the massacre by Serbian forces.

However, only six of them eventually managed to escape alive, he added.

Tadic’s lawyer accused Zylfiu of contradicting statements he made to Kosovo’s Special Prosecution in 2012, but the witness insisted his testimony was correct.

“The truth is what I am saying here today. Then, I might have missed something… I might have been traumatised, but this is the truth,” Zylfiu said.

Another prosecution witness, Agron Limani, told the court on Tuesday that he saw Darko Tasic in uniform.

“I have seen Darko several times in a uniform, a police uniform too,” Limani said.

“I want to point out that during the conflict years, the Serbs in Krushe e Vogel/Mala Krusha made our lives unbearable. Almost every day there were gunshots, while especially in the family of Darko Tasic, there were so-called ‘parties’ at which gunshots were heard,” the witness added.

He said that after the massacre, his family fled for the mountains, and on the way they saw the Hajdari family’s houses burning.

Limani told the court that after the war, he collected the testimonies of people from the village as co-author of a book entitled ‘The Murdered Village’, some of whom mentioned defendant Tasic’s involvement, he said.

He also said that a now-deceased man called Sylejman Collaku had testified to the EU rule-of-law mission EULEX that he had seen Srecko Tasic, Darko’s father, together with his two sons and some other people, taking a truck with dead bodies to the Drin River and setting fire to it.

A witness in the trial told the court on Monday that he saw the defendant with his father and others after the massacre at the River Drin with a truck carrying corpses, which they tried to drive into the river.

After Limani’s testimony, defendant Tasic told the court: “I thank the witness Agron Limani for confessing what he personally knows and not what he heard. He was correct and exact, and did not invent things like others.”

Read more:

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