"Marjan was being threatened for socializing with Serbs"

"At the time of his disappearance, I had already moved to Gracanica and we were not so close anymore. I could only infer from his behavior that somebody was threatening him because of something. For example, when we were supposed to go somewhere where we had gone before, he would not want to go, he would avoid it etc.," says Olivera Bernardoni Stojanovic, a friend of Marjan Melonasi, Radio Kosovo journalist, who was abducted on 9 September 2000.

On that day, after completing his program at 2 pm, he got into an orange taxi in the center of Pristina, across the street from the Radio, and he has been lost without a trace ever since.

- All of us have constantly been making enquiries everywhere, both at UNMIK and KFOR, but I have never heard that an investigation is being conducted, or that someone has taken his disappearance seriously. I have not found anything out, but I have heard stories about the town that he had disappeared in Vranjevac (a settlement that was a no-go zone for Serbs, populated by KLA members, who settled there after the war, which was considered a "red zone"). I have called his father and grandfather once, even they did not know anything. I have heard his mother launched a number of initiatives to find him, but I have never met her. To this day, I cannot understand why someone would kidnap him, kill him - says Olivera Bernardoni Stojanovic, who returned to Pristina from Aleksinac in June 1999, as soon as the Kumanovo Agreement was signed, in the hope of completing her philosophy studies.

Journalism aficionado

Upon returning to Pristina, instead of studying, she started working with Marjan Melonasi in the Swiss non-governmental organization Media Action International, "which gathered and...