Kosovo: Murdered Serbs Remembered
23/7/2010
LIPLJAN — Today marks 11 years since 14 Serb farmers were killed in Kosovo while harvesting their fields.
The perpetrators of the Staro Gacko killings remain unknown to this day.
Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) dignitaries took part in memorial services this Friday in the village near the town of Lipljan.
Serbia’s parliament official and head of the Missing Persons Commission Veljko Odalović, and Radmila Trajković, who represented Serbs living in central Kosovo, also joined the locals for the ceremonies.
Trajković said “special international investigative teams conducted the investigation in continuity”, that she had learned that an “important person of the Kosovo Liberation Army” was behind the killings, but that his arrest would “destabilize the situation in the province”.
The victims, a 17-year-old boy among them, were ambushed and gunned down as they worked their fields.
The farmers murdered on July 23, 1999, were Milovan Jovanović, Jovica and Rade Živić, Andrija Odalović, Slobodan, Mile, Novica and Momir Janićijević, Stanimir and Bosko Dekić, Saša and Ljubiša Cvejić, Nikola Stojanović, and Miodrag Tepsić.
In October 2007, UNMIK police detained an ethnic Albanian suspect, identified as Mazlum Bitiqi, in connection to the case. Bitiqi was set free two months later, with UNMIK citing a lack of evidence against him.
