Last Despatches: Serbian TV Workers Killed by NATO Strike

The RTS building after it was bombed by NATO on April 23. Photo: Srdjan Suki/EPA.

Minutes before a NATO missile hit the headquarters of Serbia's national broadcaster Radio-Television Serbia on March 23, 1999, TV engineer Dragan Sukovic left his offices on the fourth floor of the building to go down into the studio on a mezzanine where the news was being broadcast.

"We felt something that few living people can say they have felt, which is to be at the epicentre of an explosion of a two-ton bomb," Sukovic told BIRN.

He instantly went into shock: "I don't know how I managed to snap out of it [and realise] that I was alive. I started running, pulled some people with me, another colleague dragged some others," he said.

Sukovic recalled how the part of the building that was hit collapsed to the ground floor, creating a slope of debris which some of the staff climbed down to escape.

A total of 16 RTS employees were killed in the NATO air strike. The justification offered by the Western military alliance was that RTS was part of the Yugoslav regime's communications network and that it was spreading propaganda for Slobodan Milosevic's war effort in Kosovo.

It is widely believed that Serbia's political leadership at the time gave an order to RTS director Dragoljub Milanovic to leave the workers in the building, exposing them to the attack.

Nobody from NATO has ever been held accountable for their deaths, and nobody except Milanovic was ever put on trial in Serbia.

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Last Despatches: about the series

BIRN's Last Despatches series documents some of the 140 reporters and other media workers who were killed during and after the 1990s wars in the Balkans - some of them foreigners...