07 Aug 14

The authorities are restarting the search for the remains of Kosovo Albanian victims at a mass grave at the Rudnica quarry in southern Serbia, where 45 bodies have already been exhumed.

Gordana Andric
BIRN
Belgrade

The Serbian war crimes prosecutor’s office said it was resuming the search at two locations at the Rudnica quarry on Thursday for the remains of Albanians suspected to have been killed by Belgrade’s forces during the 1998-99 conflict in Kosovo.

So far, the bodies of 45 victims have been found buried at the quarry near the southern town of Raska, close to the Serbia-Kosovo border.

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

Prenk Gjetaj, the head of the Kosovo government’s missing persons commission, has said that the authorities believe that the corpses are those of Kosovo Albanians who went missing during the conflict in Rrezalla, a village in the Skenderaj/Srbice area.

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

The area was first probed 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 near 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.