Kosovo Court Cuts Prison Sentence for Serb Convicted of Wartime Massacre

Kosovo's Court of Appeals on Tuesday halved the prison sentence handed down against a Serbian former police officer over the massacre of ethnic Albanian civilians in the village of Krusha e Vogel/Mala Krusha in March 1999.

Darko Tasic, a former police reservist, was sentenced in June to 22 years in prison by the district court in the southern town of Prizren. The Court of Appeals revised the sentence to 11 years, "in which the time spent in detention of remand was also calculated," it said in a statement.

Serbian forces machine-gunned 109 people - males aged between 13 and 72 - in a barn in Krusha e Vogel/Mala Krusha during the 1998-99 Kosovo war; prosecutors accused Tasic of burning the dead bodies and disposing of them in a nearby river, as well as robbing and then burning property. Twenty of the 109 escaped.

Witnesses told the court that they had seen Tasic and his father driving an orange truck carrying corpses, setting it on fire and pushing it into the Drini River.

British journalist John Sweeney, who testified in the trial, recalled covering the aftermath of the massacre in an interview with BIRN in July.

"I went for a swim in the river and the truck was half in the river and half out," Sweeney said. The bodies were no longer in the truck, he said, but "there was a blood stain on the side of the truck, and a bone."