Last Despatches: Serb Radio Team Abducted in Kosovo and Never Found

It was August 21, 1998 when a team from Radio Pristina was deployed to Zociste in western Kosovo on an assignment.

In the car was radio journalist Djuro Slavuj and driver Ranko Perenic.

They had both worked for Radio Pristina for years: Perenic started in 1980 and Slavuj in 1995, and both of them lived and worked in Kosovo at the point when the conflict between Yugoslav forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army intensified. By 1998, there had already been a dozen murders and kidnappings of civilians in Kosovo.

Perenic and Slavuj's assignment that August 21 was to cover the return of several monks who had been abducted from the Sveti Vraci (Holy Healers) monastery in Zociste. They left the newsroom in Pristina in the morning, got into a blue Zastava car and drove off.

The editor-in-chief of Radio Pristina at the time, Milivoje Mihajlovic, who is now the deputy general director at Serbian public broadcaster RTS, said that the two men had also been in the same area the day before.

"They went the next day on the same assignment, the editor sent them because they needed to add something to that report they were working on and when I came back in the evening, I was notified that night that they had not come back from the field. Of course, I knew it wasn't something innocent," Mihajlovic told BIRN.

Perenic and Slavuj did not make it back to the office. They were stopped when coming back from the village of Velika Hoca/Hoca e Madhe in the Orahovac/Rehovec area by a group of armed people who had KLA insignia.

The armed group who stopped the car threatened the two Radio Pristina workers journalists with weapons and then took them away to an unknown location.

These details were established during an investigation conducted in...