Serbia Repatriates 24 War Victims’ Bodies to Kosovo

The EU rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, EULEX, said on Friday that it had received the remains of the ethnic Albanians who are believed to have been killed by Serbian forces during the conflict and their bodies then taken to the Rudnica quarry near Raska for secret burial in a mass grave.

"EULEX personnel working for the Kosovo Department of Forensic Medicine (DFM) received from the Serbian authorities the repatriated remains of 24 individuals exhumed during recent excavations in Raska," EULEX said in a statement.

"Additional evidentiary material and other documentation were also received," it added.

The remains will be transported to the DFM headquarters in Pristina for identification, and then handed over to the victims' families.

This was the second repatriation of bodies exhumed from the mass grave at the Rudnica quarry. So far, a total of 40 bodies have been sent back to Kosovo.

According to Prenk Gjetaj, the head of the Kosovo government's missing persons commission, a total of 45 bodies have been found there.

Gjetaj said that the authorities believe that the corpses are those of Kosovo Albanians who went missing during the 1998-99 conflict in Rrezalla, a village in the Skenderaj/Srbice area.

However DNA tests have yet to substantiate this suspicion.

The area near Rudnica was first probed in 2010, after the Serbian war crimes prosecution, in cooperation with the EU rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, announced that there could be a mass grave in Raska containing the bodies of at least 250 Albanians, although nothing was found until last year.

There are still around 1,700 people listed as missing as a result of the Kosovo conflict.