The Belgrade Higher Court opened the trial against Nezir Mehmetaj, a Kosovo Albanian accused by Serbia of committing war crimes against civilians in the village of Rudice in the Klina municipality in June 1999.
According to the indictment, Mehmetal was involved in the killing of seven people and burning and looting houses in his village which belonged to non-Albanian families, as a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
It says that he participated in killing five members of the Dasic family in mid-June 1999, also in the killings of two other persons, Ramadan Jelaj and Zorka Siljakovic which were separate incidents at the end of June, Balkan Insight reported.
On the other side, Mehmetaj himself denied all the accusations saying that he was living in Switzerland with his family during the time these alleged crimes occurred.
He said that he left Kosovo in 1987 and went to work in Switzerland and did not go to Kosovo during the war in 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,” Balkan Insight quoted Mehmetaj as saying in the court.
After going back to Kosovo together with his family who were refugees in Albania, he said he started looking for his father, who was arrested in 1998 and whose whereabouts were unknown. He was found in a prison in Sremska Mitrovica in Serbia.
“I found out that my father was alive in mid-October when Red Cross representatives came to our house [in Rudice]. At the end of November [1999], I went back to Switzerland, to my wife and family,” Mehmetaj told the court.
Mehmetaj is in custody since January 2020 when he was arrested at the Medare border crossing between Kosovo and Serbia, based on a Serbian warrant.
The trial on his case continues in May.
