Kosovo’s Government Commission on Missing Persons visits mass grave site in Serbia

English

Gazeta Express

04/12/2020 16:11

Representatives of Kosovo’s Government Commission on Missing Persons visited Friday the location in Kizevak, Serbia, where last month was found a mass grave with bodies of Albanians killed during the war in 1999. The excavation work on an abandoned open cast mine is ongoing.

Authorities believe that in this mass grave are bodies of at least 17 persons who were killed in Kosovo, but their bodies were transported in Serbia by Serbian police and military forces as part of a coverup operation to hide war crime traces.

Kosovo delegation is led by the state coordinator on the issue of missing persons, Ibrahim Makolli who held a joint press conference with Veljko Odalovic, head of Serbia’s Government Commission on missing persons.

Director of Kosovo’s Institute on Forensic Medicine, Arsim Gerxhaliu, confirmed to Gazeta Express that they have discovered five graves at the site. “Yes we have discovered five graves. We found human remains and we will continue working as long as weather conditions allow us,” Gerxhalliu told Gazeta Express.

EULEX in a press release issued on 20 November described how their experts identified the exact location where the human remains were discovered in a large quarry site in Serbia. EULEX experts have been carrying out excavations in Kizevak since 2015. After several unsuccessful excavation seasons in Kizevak, a breakthrough happened in 2020 thanks to the use of aerial images. “The problem was that these are large quarry sites and the landscape kept changing over time due to the fact that the quarry was still in use for a number of years,” said Javier Santana, EULEX’s forensic archeologist. The process of identifying the exact location of the human remains was further complicated due to the fact that there are four to five levels in the mine with an approximate height of 13 meters each.

After EULEX’s request to receive aerial images from 1999, the International Committee of the Red Cross made the aerial images available to the Kosovo Government Commission on Missing Persons and the Serbian Government Commission on Missing Persons at the end of 2019. After identifying the location, experts from EULEX, the Kosovo Institute of Forensic Medicine, and the Serbian Government Commission on Missing Persons carried out field work in Kizevak, which led to the discovery of the human remains. 21 years after the end of the war in Kosovo there are more than 1,600 people who are considered as missing. /GazetaExpress/