21 Aug 14
Investigators have failed to find more corpses of Kosovo Albanian victims during a renewed search at a quarry in southern Serbia where 45 bodies have already been exhumed.

Nektar Zogjani
BIRN
Pristina

The Kosovo government’s missing persons commission told BIRN that the search launched three weeks ago at the Rudnica quarry near the southern Serbian town of had failed to uncover any further human remains.

“The searches will continue until the whole location is verified. But I think that this process will end very soon. So far, we have not found bodily remains,” said the head of the commission, Preng Gjetaj.

The latest search for the remains of Albanians suspected to have been killed by Belgrade’s forces during the 1998-99 conflict in Kosovo started on August 7, after the bodies of 45 victims were found buried in a mass grave elsewhere at the quarry.

Searches at the quarry first started in 2007, and were followed by exhumations in 2010, 2011 and 2013.

The Serbian war crimes prosecution has been leading the Rudnica investigation along with teams from the EU rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, the Red Cross, the International Commission for Missing Persons and the Kosovo missing persons commission.

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