Peja/Pec

Svetomir Bacevic stands accused of seizing a 60-year-old ethnic Albanian civilian from her home in the village of Bellopje/Belo Polje in Kosovo's Peja/Pec municipality in the summer of 1998, according to the indictment which has been obtained by BIRN.

The Court of Appeals in Pristina on Monday rejected appeals from the defence and prosecution and upheld the 12-year sentence handed down to Zoran Djokic for war crimes against civilians in 1999.

"The verdict contains sufficient and convincing reasons for establishing the facts clearly," the court said in the verdict.

Kosovo civil society activists protested on Tuesday in front of the Kosovo Judicial Council in Pristina after a verdict handed down by a local court in the town of Peja/Pec sentenced a man to eight months and eight days in prison for sexually abusing a 15-year-old.

Police confirmed on Thursday evening that a group of minors from the western town of Peja/Pec has been identified and interviewed for stoning a Serb woman's house in the town centre.

It was the morning of May 14, 1999 when Serbian forces rounded up Rexhe Kelmendi, his brother Dema and a few other relatives and neighbours in a house in the ethnic Albanian-populated village of Qyshk/Cuska.

Pristina Basic Court found Zoran Djokic guilty on Thursday of war crimes against the ethnic Albanian civil population in the town of Peja/Pec during the Kosovo war in 1999 and sentenced him to 12 years in prison.

In closing arguments on Thursday in the trial of former Serb fighter Zoran Djokic at Pristina Basic Court, the prosecution called for the defendant to be found guilty of war crimes against Kosovo Albanian civilians in the town of Peja/Pec and jailed.

Yugoslav-era mines lie scattered across the ground in an area marked off with sticks. In the middle of the area, the remains of a dead animal can be seen.

To the left, another zone is marked as 'contaminated' with unexploded ordnance, although no mines are visible to the eye. Instead they are covered by vegetation, even deadlier than if they were in plain sight.

Witness Valbona Berisha told Pristina Basic Court on Thursday that defendant Zoran Djukic was the man who took her brother Bashkim Berisha away from their home to a neighbour's house in the town of Peja/Pec, where he was killed in March 1999.

Haxhi Balaj remembers that it was sunny on May 5, 1999, and that his mother Shehrije was trying to find something for lunch for the family.

They had run out of flour, among the many other things they were missing in those difficult days during the Kosovo war.