How Kosovo War Victims’ Bodies Were Wrongly Identified

In Seljadiin's coffin was Nazim's name, and in Nazim's coffin, Seljadiin's was written.

A month later, the family took the body of Rasim, while in 2007, the authorities handed over the bones of Nazim and in 2009, those of Selajdin.

But several days after that, the graves were reopened and the bones were exhumed again. Three months later, a total of six people were identified from the remains found in the graves of Hajdari's two brothers.

"I had suspected since the beginning because when they brought the coffins, they were too heavy," he said.

Three years later, in 2012, the remains of another of his brothers, 12-year-old Mursel, and his father were also found.

Like Flurim Hajdari, other families in Kosovo have suffered the trauma of finding out their relatives who were killed during the 1998-99 war were wrongly identified before they were buried.

In the aftermath of the war, almost 6,000 people were buried after being identified through their clothes or other belongings, because the more sophisticated and reliable process of DNA matching was not available at that time.

This sometimes led to errors, and as a result, some people found that they had buried someone who they believed was their relative, but was actually someone else.

The EU rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, EULEX, told BIRN that "cases of misidentification represent between four per cent and six per cent of the total number of missing persons to date". EULEX stressed that this is just an estimate, but it shows that "while some misidentifications took place in 1999 and 2000, the effect was very small".

Forensic scientists working for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia investigated more than 150 mass grave sites in Kosovo...