Kosovo Massacre Survivors Fear Serbian Verdict Won’t Bring Justice

Gashi said there were 30 people in her house when the attack started, including some who had already been displaced from other villages in Kosovo by the fighting.

"We started to flee towards the river. But before we reached it, half of them were killed," she recalled. "I saw Behare [Krasniqi] killed first. A grenade took off a part of her head. She was nine months' pregnant and had come from the village of Studencan to find refuge."

Then she watched as her 13-year-old daughter Besarta was shot dead: "Besarta ran after her grandmother and aunt, and the three of them were killed, one after another."

On Tuesday, the verdict in the trial of Pavle Gavrilovic and Ranko Kozlina, two former Yugoslav Army officers accused of involvement in the killings of 27 Kosovo Albanians during the attack on Terrne/Trnje that day, will be handed down by the Belgrade Higher Court.

Gavrilovic, commander of a unit in the Yugoslav Army's 549th Brigade, is accused of ordering the attack, while Kozlina, together with three other soldiers, opened fire on 18 civilians including women and children, killing 16 of them, the indictment alleges. Other civilians were shot in several other houses in the village, it also claims.

Both men pleaded not guilty to the charges against them.

Gashi claimed she saw Kozlina at the scene of the massacre, as the Serbian fighters moved in to gather up the survivors of the shooting who were trying to escape by wading into the river.

"They were around 20 soldiers, the others were paramilitaries, with their faces painted. There were also people with police uniforms. Ranko Kozlin was among them," she alleged.

They then separated her husband Shaban and three others from the rest ofr the surviving villagers, and shot all...