Grisly Discovery in Serbia Brings Trauma Back to Kosovo Village

Heavy rain cut short Besim Deliu's work at the memorial site in the village of Rezalla where he had gone to clean up his father's grave.

The grave has been left empty for more than two decades while he was waiting for the body of his father Xhelil to be found, and he has often had to remove water that has gathered there during downpours.

Xhelil Deliu was among 98 Kosovo Albanian civilians who were killed by Serbian forces on April 5, 1999 in Rezalla. The day afterwards, the Serbs returned to take the bodies away, transporting many of them to mass graves near Raska in southern Serbia in an attempted cover-up operation.

Until last month, Xhelil Deliu and six others were the last people still listed as missing from the massacre.

Besim Deliu said that he was recently told unofficially that his father's remains had been found in a mass grave in Kizevak in Serbia during an exhumation in June, after satellite imagery was used to locate the grave site in a remote open-cast mine near Raska.

The Kosovo government has announced that the remains of at least nine individuals were recovered, and that the DNA identification process is expected to be completed by the end of this month.

"We hope that after 22 years, we will finally fill in all of our family graves," Deliu told BIRN at his house in Rezalla.

'My brother dug a hole and found his son's body'

Besim Deliu at his father's grave. Photo: Serbeze Haxhiaj/BIRN.

Deliu remembers that it was afternoon on April 3, 1999 when he and some of his male relatives were in the forest near the village and heard shouts and screams.

His six-year-old nephew Bleart and his nephew Lulever, aged 12, were killed by a sniper from the Serbian police...