Six-year jail sentence imposed on Nezir Mehmetaj for war crimes against non-Serbs in a Kosovo village in 1999 condemned by the speaker of Kosovo's parliament – who calls the charges 'invented and arbitrary'.
Milica Stojanovic and Perparim Isufi, December 6, 2024
Belgrade Higher Court. Photo: BIRN
Belgrade’s Higher Court sentenced Nezir Mehmetaj, a Kosovo Albanian, to six years in prison for war crimes against civilians in the village of Rudice in Klina municipality in Kosovo in June and July 1999.
Mehmetaj has been in custody in Serbia for almost five years and the court said his custody would be extended until he starts serving the sentence.
Glauk Konjufca, speaker of Kosovo’s parliament, condemned the charges as “invented and arbitrary”.
“The old mentality of Serbia, which has committed genocide in Kosovo, cannot produce anything new besides covering up crimes on one side and inventing them on the other side,” Konjufca said in a Facebook post.
“I strongly condemn this injustice and ask the international community to increase pressure on Serbia over this injustice and in support of human rights,” he added.
Serbia’s War Crimes Prosecution sought a 15-year prison sentence.
The defence claimed the Prosecution did not prove the indictment and said all the prosecution’s witnesses were indirect, “hearsay” witnesses who only heard about the charges in the indictment from others.
According to the indictment, Mehmetaj participated in killing five members of the Dasic family in mid-June 1999, and then in the killings of two other people, Jelaj Ramadan and Zorka Siljakovic, at the end of that month.
The indictment claimed he was a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, at the time.
Mehmetaj and other unnamed KLA members also looted and burned ten houses in the village in July 1999, all of them belonging to non-Albanians, the indictment said.
He is further accused of harassing members of the Roma and Egyptian community in Rudice. In July 1999, he reportedly by force brought six or seven Roma and Egyptian teens to his house in the village, forced them to dig a pit for an hour and then opened fire in their direction. They fled in fear and later left the village and never returned.
Mehmetaj denied all the charges.
At the opening of the trial in 2021, he said he was born in Rudice but had left Kosovo in 1987 to work in Switzerland. He said he only returned to visit his family once a year but did not return to Kosovo during the war until it had ended, in September 1999.
“I came to Kosovo for the first time [after the war] in September 1999 via Albania, I bought a car in Durres, took my mother, sisters and brother and went with them to the village of Rudice,” Mehmetaj told the court.
He was arrested in January 2020 at the Merdare border crossing between Serbia and Kosovo, on a Serbian warrant. He has been in custody ever since.
The verdict can be appealed.
Copyright BIRN 2015