Kosovo Liberation Army veterans will protest against the creation of a new EU-backed court that will try ex-fighters suspected of war crimes allegedly committed during and after the 1998-99 conflict.

Veterans’ groups on Tuesday called for people to join them on a march through the streets of Pristina on Wednesday against the creation of the special court, which they say is an insult to the Kosovo Liberation Army’s wartime heroism.

Fifteen former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army’s wartime ‘Drenica Group’ cell told their trial that they defended their land from their enemy but did not commit war crimes.

In their closing statements on Monday at Mitrovica Basic Court, the 15 defendants rejected the charges against them and asked for acquittal, saying they were not guilty of the abuse of civilian prisoners at a KLA detention centre in the village of Likovc/Likovac during the Kosovo conflict.

Serbia's Prime Minister has given a cool response to leaks of the President's platform on Kosovo, which has not been revealed in entirety but, according to the daily newspaper Politika, TV B92 and some other media, offers Kosovo only the status of a province within Serbia.

The offer is clearly unacceptable to Kosovo, which declared independence in 2008, as well as to the many Western countries, including the US, which recognised it as an inde

Kosovo faced harsher criteria for the lifting of EU visa requirements than all the other countries in the Western Balkans, a local think tank said.

Kosovo’s path towards visa-free travel in the Schengen zone has been markedly more difficult than that of other Western Balkan countries, said a report published on Monday by the Group for Legal and Political Studies (GLPS), a Kosovo think-tank.

The EU rule-of-law mission, EULEX, on Monday said it had found human remains in a village cemetery in the Skenderaj/Srbica area of Kosovo after a villager provided information.