13 Oct 14
The remains of the 12 ethnic Albanians killed by Belgrade’s forces during the late 1990s war and buried in a mass grave near the Serbian town of Raska were repatriated to Kosovo.

Petrit Collaku
BIRN
Pristina
Exhumation at the Rudnica quarry.

The remains were handed over at the Merdare border crossing between Kosovo and Serbia on Monday after being exhumed from a mass grave at the Rudnica quarry near Raska, not far from the border, where more than 40 bodies have been found.

Prenk Gjetaj, the head of Kosovo’s missing persons commission, said that families of the victims held a memorial for their loved ones after the bodies were handed over.

“The 12 mortal remains are here. They are about to be transferred to Pristina as soon as families finish the tribute,” Gjetaj told BIRN.

Kosovo’s missing persons commission believes that the corpses in the mass grave are those of Kosovo Albanians who went missing during the 1998-99 conflict in Rrezalla, a village in the Skenderaj/Srbice area, and were then buried in the quarry in southern Serbia to conceal evidence of the crime.

The area near Rudnica was first probed in 2010, after the Serbian war crimes prosecution, in cooperation with the EU rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, announced that there could be a mass grave in Raska containing the bodies of at least 250 Albanians, although nothing was found until last year.

There are still around 1,700 people listed as missing as a result of the Kosovo conflict.