Peć

Tijana Vasic, the former sister-in-law of Milan Ivanovic, told Belgrade Higher Court on Monday that the defendant was at home with his family when the massacre of Kosovo Albanians in which he was allegedly involved took place in April 1999.

The prosecution announced on Friday that it has charged a Kosovo Serb, who it identified only by the initials M.Dj., with participating in an attack on ethnic Albanian civilians during the war in 1999.

The former policeman Mfrom the village of Vitomirica in Kosovo Peja/Pec municipality has been charged with war crimes against the civilian population.

"On March 24, I noticed that my parents were worried more than ever. It was an anxious day. My father did not have to go to work," Dimitrijevic told BIRN. "In the evening we heard that the bombing had started and there were explosions."

A Kosovo court has jailed Svetomir Bacevic for five years for taking a Kosovo Albanian woman from her home and mistreating her in the Peja/Pec municipality during the war in 1998.

Svetomir Bacevic, who is being tried for seizing a Kosovo Albanian woman from her home and mistreating her in the Peja/Pec municipality during the war in 1998, declined to enter a plea in court.

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.

Kosovo police have arrested a man named as Driton Podrimqaku after a citizen from the western Kosovo town of Peja/ Pec reported to BIRN about being the victim of usury - defined in Kosovo law as taking advantage of a person's economic circumstances to extract disproportionate services or rates of interest on loans.

The Basic Court at Peje/Pec in Kosovo has ordered the reopening of the trial for the murder of a 29-year-old following a series of dramatic developments in recent days that caught public attention.

"The main trial is reopened," Presiding Judge Violeta Husaj Rugova declared on Friday, explaining that further completion of "the criminal proceedings" was now necessary.

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.

His was among the first 12 bodies found in the mass grave at the Peja/Pec cemetery by Hague Tribunal experts who were searching for evidence for their indictments of Serbia's military and political leaders for war crimes in Kosovo.