Macedonia Drops Charges in NATO Killings Case

Macedonia's Special Prosecution said on Monday that it is dropping all charges against 11 ethnic Albanian residents of the north-eastern village of Sopot who were being retried for allegedly planting a mine in 2003 that killed two Polish NATO soldiers and one Macedonian civilian.

"After a complete analysis… we determined it would be fair to drop the charges today due to lack of evidence," Chief Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva told media in front of Skopje Criminal Court.

Janeva explained that the Special Prosecution determined that the entire case, one of the longest in Macedonia's judicial history, had been based on a single witness, Ramadan Bajrami, who had been forced by the authorities to give his testimony.

Her explanation chimes with what the defence lawyers have been claiming all along.

"We have been insisting that the people are innocent for 14 years," one of the defence lawyers told media.

Janeva however added that the Special Prosecution is not planning to completely close the case and it now has another theory about the incident which it plan to investigate further.

The defence said it will demand reparations for its clients who have spent many years in jail and in the courts.

The mine explosion in Sopot happened in 2003 when Macedonia was still recovering from the 2001 armed conflict between ethnic Albanian insurgents and the security forces.

After a prolonged trial, the 12 defendants were originally sentenced in March 2010 to a total of 150 years in jail, but after Macedonia's ethnic Albanian political parties complained, a parliamentary commission decided that there were some omissions during the trial.

The parliamentary commission's decision rested on a claim...