02 Oct 14
The supreme court in Pristina acquitted two Kosovo Serbs who were charged with raping a 16-year-old ethnic Albanian girl during the war in April 1999.

Petrit Collaku
BIRN
Pristina

The two suspects, former Serb policeman Jovica Dejanovic from Priluzje and Djordje Bojkovic from Babin Most, have been cleared of the rape charges, their lawyers said on Thursday.

“The supreme court delivered the right decision which is in compliance with all positive laws in Kosovo,” Bojkovic’s lawyer, Miodrag Brkljac, told BIRN.

Dejanovic told Serbian media that the case against them had been fabricated.

“I had black hair during my imprisonment and I have come out all gone grey from suffering. The entire case was staged and the witnesses were false,” Dejanovic said, the InSerbia news website reported.

Bojkovic claimed that the purpose of their prosecution was to drive Serbs out of Kosovo.

“I have experienced a severe trauma… It is a known fact that their intention is to banish us from our centuries-long homesteads,” he said, according to InSerbia.

EU rule-of-law mission police arrested Dejanovic and Bojkovic in September 2012 on suspicion of raping the Kosovo Albanian victim who was 16 at the time of the alleged incident on April 14, 1999.

But the court acquitted them in April 2013 because it was not proved beyond reasonable doubt that they committed the offence.

Both of them were arrested again in June this year after the appeals court overturned the verdict and Dejanovic was sentenced to 10 years in jail and Bojkovic to 12 years, but the men’s defence then took the case to the supreme court, which acquitted them.