Prizren

The story went viral quickly and was republished by almost countless news portals, media and social media pages, so that now it is still impossible to determine which media initiated the report.

Political parties were on the final day of a shortened election campaign this Friday as Kosovo voters in more than half the country's municipalities prepared to vote on Sunday in the second round of mayoral elections.

In a blow after its meteoric rise eight months ago, Kosovo's ruling Vetevendosje party will have to wait for the second round of local elections to see whether it has won control of any of the country's 38 municipalities.

Kurti's party did badly even in the municipalities where it had more than 60 percent of the votes in the parliamentary elections in February.
That Kurti experienced a total debacle is shown by the fact that in 38 municipalities in which there were elections, he did not get a sufficient number of votes to win in the first round.

Serbs have presidential candidates in 11 local governments.
Polling stations were closed at 7 p.m.
Prime Minister of the so-called Kosovo, Albin Kurti, was locked in offices and did not appear before reporters, although they waited for him for several hours for a statement regarding the latest information on local elections in Kosovo and Metohija.

It was the opening night of the first edition of the Kosovo film festival, DokuFest, planned to be held in the garden of a Prizren cinema, the Lumbardhi, almost a ruin at the time.

It was June 13, 1999, and Uli Reinhardt, a photojournalist from the German news magazine Stern was due to meet his colleague Gabriel Gruener at 6pm in the southern Kosovo city of Prizren.

But Gruener would never arrive for the meeting, and could not be contacted by mobile phone because Kosovo's telecommunications system had been damaged in the war.

"We have come to express our revulsion and dissatisfaction with the reduction of the sentence of the criminal Darko Tasic. We will now go inside with a group of five family members and talk to the president of the court and see what he will tell us," Selami Hoti, a representative of one of the families of the victims of the Krushe e Vogel/ Mala Krushe massacre, told BIRN.

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.

Data differences

Outdated statistics complicate efforts to identify patterns and trends in a sector, hindering the efforts of policymakers, researchers and analysts to draw conclusions and draft recommendations or policies. Often, such "analyses are incomplete," said Olluri.