In the village of Piskote near Djakovica, at least three people have been exhumed, and further investigation will determine whether there are still bodies buried in this place. According to the Vesti portal, the President of the Commission for missing of the Government of Serbia, Veljko Odalovic, also confirmed this information and said that most likely those were remains of the Serbs who were kidnapped or disappeared during 1999.
The portal reminds that the Deputy Director of the EULEX Department of Forensic Medicine Tarja Formisto confirmed for Pristina based KTV that they had exhumed the remains of three people suspected of killing during the 1998-1999 conflict in Kosovo.
Odalovic also confirmed and added that more details about the number of bodies found and their nationality would be known only after the complete search of the site has been completed.
– Our investigators have been in contact with the representatives of EULEX from the beginning, they are at this location from the very first day. I was there on Friday and according to the agreement I reached, the research of this site will continue this week. However, only after the DNA analysis of the mortal remains we will know about the number of people in question, but also their ethnicity, although it is most likely that those are the missing Serbs – Odalovic says for Vesti portal.
He says that EULEX started a site research in Djakovica, based on the information provided by the Commission for the Missing of the Government of Serbia last year.
– We have an excellent cooperation with them and with KFOR and around the exhumation, but also in finding additional evidence in this case – said Odalovic.
The War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Serbia, in cooperation with the War Crimes Investigation Unit at the EULEX Prosecutor’s Office, came to information about the location of a potential tomb in the village of Piskote in October 2014. The Serbian prosecution has announced that it has information that possible mortal remains at this location could belong to the victims of the crimes of the KLA members in the Likovac detention camp. The EULEX Prosecutor’s Office issued this order for the exhumation, autopsy and identification of possible mortal remains at a defined location, reports this portal.
According to Vesti, the authorities in Serbia came to this information from the testimony of a protected witness. This portal also states that the authorities in Pristina last year banned exhumation at this site and that only after the pressure from EULEX and KFOR it was possible to do it.
