BELGRADE - A Kosovo Albanian prosecution witness did not blame leader of the Citizens' Initiative 'Freedom, Democracy, Justice' (SDP) Oliver Ivanovic for a murder of four Albanians in April 1999 during a court hearing in a case against Ivanovic and four other Serbs on Monday.

During the hearing, the witness, Mentor Mehana, said nothing to point to Ivanovic as being responsible for the crime, Ljubomir Pantovic, one of the defense lawyers, told reporters.

Prosecution witness Bedzet Ferizi, an ethnic Albanian, who gave a testimony in court on February 20, also did not say Ivanovic was responsible for the crime. While responding to the prosecutor’s questions, he said that he did not even know the defendant, and he was consequently not even questioned by the defense.

The prosecution has for more witnesses to call in connection with the first count in the indictment against Ivanovic. So far, it has examined seven, and none of them pointed to Ivanovic as directly responsible for the crime, and only one (Isa Mustafa) claimed that Ivanovic had been the head of a Serb paramilitary police unit who had encouraged his subordinates to kill four Albanians in Kosovska Mitrovica.

On February 20, the Serbian government’s Office for Kosovo-Metohija (KiM) requested that Ivanovic and the four other Serb defendants be released from custody and that the entire court process be stopped.

The Office for KiM pointed out on that occasion that UNMIK had already conducted proceedings against them, for the same criminal offense, in 2002, and the Kosovo court made up of international judges had decided to discontinue the investigation since no corroborating evidence had been found for the accusations.

“To launch investigations and proceedings against the same persons and for the same offense twice, knowing that they have spent more than a year in custody this time, amounts to harassing and intimidating them and, as a result, other members of the Serb community in Kosovo-Metohija as well,” the Office for KiM said in a release.

Ivanovic is charged with acting in his capacity as chief of the so-called Bridge Watchers group (who protected north Kosovska Mitrovica from intrusion by Albanian extremists from the southern part of the city) and ordering the murder of four ethnic Albanians that occurred in the southern part of Kosovska Mitrovica on April 14, 1999 (during the armed conflict in Kosovo and NATO bombing of Serbia).

The SDP leader is also charged with being responsible for the murder of ten ethnic Albanians in the northern part of the city during unrest on February 3, 2000, sparked off by an incident in which a bomb was thrown into a cafe in north Mitrovica and left 14 Serbs injured.

The four other Serb defendants are Dragoljub Delibasic, father and son Ilija and Nebojsa Vujacic and Aleksandar Lazovic. They are charged with committing the crimes of aggravated murder and attempted aggravated murder in February 2000.

Ivanovic is facing a sentence of between five years and a lifetime in prison.

The trial started on December 18 last year and all the accused pleaded not guilty.