Serbian authorities re-started the examination of a suspected mass grave near the town of Raska where it is believed ethnic Albanians killed by Serbian forces in the Kosovo war may be buried.
Pristina
“Today all conditions have been created for the examination to continue,” said Pajazit Nushi, head of the Kosovo delegation in the dialogue on missing persons with Serbia.
Workers were preparing to destroy a building on the site under which a mass grave is believed to be located, he said.
He made his comments on Monday after a working group session in Pristina on persons unaccounted for after the Kosovo conflict, organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
The search for buried bodies of victims killed in the 1998-99 conflict started in December last year the village of Rudnica near Raska in southern Serbia on the orders of the country’s war crimes prosecution.
But the examination of the site was delayed several times due to disagreements on technical issues between the two sides.
Veljko Odalovic, the head of the Serbian government’s missing persons commission, said human remains found at the end of last year “belong to Kosovo Albanians who went missing during the conflict of 1999”.
Serbian authorities believe the Raska site contains the bodies of at least 250 Albanians killed during the late 1990s conflict.
But Nushi said “the results can be only seen once the examination is over”.
“There could be some 400 [human remains], but I don’t even believe there are 250. This will be determined at the end of the examination”, he stressed.
Some 15 years after the Kosovo conflict, more than 1,700 people remain missing.
