30 Jun 14

The authorities will investigate two more locations near a mass grave in the Serbian town of Raska, where the remains of 50 Kosovo Albanians thought to have been killed in wartime were found.
Marija Ristic
BIRN
Belgrade

Serbia’s Chief War Crimes Prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic said on Monday that the aim of the new search near the Rudnica quarry in Raska is “to determine information about the possible existence of new mass graves with the remains of people who died during the conflicts in Kosovo and Metohija in 1999, who it is believed are Kosovo Albanians”.

The Serbian authorities are already investigating two locations at the quarry. At one of them, 50 bodies of Kosovo Albanians have been exhumed, while at the other, the outcome of the search has not yet been made public.

According to Prenk Gjetaj, the head of the Kosovo government’s missing persons commission, it is believed that the corpses found so far are those of Kosovo Albanians who went missing during the 1998-99 conflict in Rrezalla, a village in the Skenderaj/Srbice area.

However DNA tests have yet to substantiate this suspicion.

The process of identifying the remains is continuing, but the names of the victims will not be made public until relatives have been informed.

The area 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 more than 1,700 people listed as missing as a result of the Kosovo conflict.