Izbica massacre accused gets sentence reduced during retrial

2026-02-02 15:23:37, Kosova & Bota CNA

During the retrial, the Basic Court in Pristina found Muhamet Alidemaj guilty and sentenced him to 13 years in prison, accused of war crimes, namely for participating in the Izbica massacre, reports Betimi për Drejtësi.

In the first trial, Alidemaj, who according to the indictment was a member of the Serbian police and military forces during the war, was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

In Izbica, Skenderaj, Serbian forces killed 130 people in March 1999.

Alidemaj was arrested in March 2021 and convicted in July 2024. But a year later the Court of Appeals remanded the case for retrial.

In both the first trial and the retrial, Alidemaj – a Serbian citizen of Albanian nationality – had pleaded not guilty to war crimes.

According to the indictment published in late March 2022, it is said that Alidemaj, together with Serbian military and police forces, separated women and children under the age of 12 from the crowd and, at gunpoint, forced them to head towards Albania.

The men remaining in the village, according to the indictment, were executed with automatic weapons and 114 of the victims have been identified, while 12 survived the execution.

The prosecution said that after two months, the bodies of the victims were exhumed and transported in several trucks in an unknown direction. After the end of the war, the bodies of the victims in Izbica were found in mass graves in Batajnica, Serbia, in the village of Suhodoll, Mitrovica, and in Novolan, Vushtrri.

Recently, the Kosovo Special Prosecution Office has filed a series of indictments for war crimes in Kosovo. Since the end of the war, dozens of people have been convicted of these crimes before local and international institutions.

Initially after the war, from 2000 and 2008 respectively, war crimes in Kosovo were investigated by the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), and from 2008, by the European Union Rule of Law Mission (EULEX).

In 2018, EULEX handed over the cases to local justice authorities.

During the war in Kosovo, from 1998 to 1999, more than 13,000 civilians were killed, while thousands more went missing.

More than 1,500 people are still missing, most of them Albanians./REL