Forensic experts are hunting for evidence at a grave site in the Kosovo village of Rezalle, where 42 Albanians were allegedly killed by Serbian forces in April 1999.
Prenk Gjetaj, the chief of Kosovo’s missing persons commission, told BIRN that the search in the village of Rezalle in the Skenderaj/Srbice municipality of northern Kosovo was launched in the hope of finding evidence that will help identify bodies which later reburied in a hidden location in Serbia.
“We are searching for human remains here, because [the bodies] were initially put in a grave here and later recovered and transported to another location,” Gjetaj said.
The remains of the 42 Kosovo Albanians who were allegedly killed by Serbian forces during an attack on the village on April 5, 1999 have not yet been found.
A Human Rights Watch report in 2001 suggested that the month after the killings, “the bodies were dug up with bulldozers from the shallow graves in the field” and the human remains were replaced with the carcasses of dead cows, according to testimony from Kosovo Liberation Army fighters.
The Kosovo authorities believe that the three of 50 bodies of Kosovo Albanians that were recently exhumed from a mass grave at a quarry near Raska in southern Serbia could be the remains of some of the people who were killed in Rezalle.
Forensic evidence from Rezalle could help to identify more of the bodies found at Raska, the authorities hope.
