BELGRADE - Excavations should continue next week at two slopes of a hill near the Rudnica quarry in southern Serbia, a site suspected of holding bodies of ethnic Albanians missing from the 1999 Kosovo-Metohija conflict.

Three sites to excavate have been identified in the area of Rudnica, near Raska. Two have already been searched – a site where a house had to be removed to carry out excavations and another above it, Chairman of the Serbian government’s commission on missing persons Veljko Odalovic has said.
“The search of the third site, two slopes of a nearby hill, will begin as early as late next week,” Odalovic said on the sidelines of a conference on consequences of the 1990’s wars from the perspective of families of the victims, organized by the Coordination of the Serbian Associations of Families of Missing Persons from the Territory of Former Yugoslavia.

He pointed out that the excavations had been financed by the Serbian government, and it had consumed enormous resources because the government's commission on missing persons had been receiving inaccurate or unreliable information.

Odalovic said that “credible evidence and serious witnesses” would have to be provided in the future, as the Serbian taxpayers' money should not be wasted just because “someone comes to the site and burdens the investigating team with unchecked assumptions.”

Serbia’s deputy war crimes prosecutor Bruno Vekaric stressed that “Serbia has approached the surveys of the sites at Rudnica most responsibly and in a most efficient manner,” recalling that the first site had held remains of 50 people, while the other hid none.

The Rudnica case was launched when a protected witness told EULEX in Pristina in 1999 that bodies of murdered Albanians had been brought to a place at the old quarry and that the site had later been covered with earth and partially paved.

Earlier searches of the site - in 2007, 2010, 2011 and 2013 - showed nothing to substantiate the claim by the witness.