Serbian Police

Members of the assembly of Srpska Lista, the Belgrade-backed Kosovo Serb party, on Tuesday re-elected Goran Rakic as president and Milan Radoicic as a party vice-president by unanimous decision. The assembly also elected Igor Simic and Dalibor Jevtic as vice-presidents.

The US embassy in Belgrade on Thursday said that Washington "cannot and will not forget" the killings of Ylli, Agron, and Mehmet Bytyqi, three US citizens of Albanian origin, on July 9, 1999, and urged a "full investigation".

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.

Serbia's police led by Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin have recently conducted several high-profile actions, hotly followed by the media, tackling refugee and migrant smuggling.

On Sunday, police said they discovered an illegal migrant camp near the borders with Hungary and Romania and detained suspected people smugglers.

President Aleksandar Vucic told a press conference on Wednesday that a total of 21 suspected mass grave locations have been examined so far in Serbia and that "we found the bodies of, it's assumed, killed Albanians at four of the 21 locations - we did not hide anything".

Nebojsa Stefanovic. Photo: EPA/JANOS MARJAI.

The Prosecutor's Office for Organised Crime told BIRN on Thursday that it has asked the Interior Ministry's Service for the Fight against Organised Crime to probe allegations that a company connected to Defence Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic's father bought weapons at preferential prices from the state arms manufacturer Krusik.

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN on June 3 launched the first comprehensive, interactive database of mass graves from the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia, giving an unprecedented insight into the largest operations to cover up war crimes in Europe since World War II.

It was the morning of May 14, 1999 when Serbian forces rounded up Rexhe Kelmendi, his brother Dema and a few other relatives and neighbours in a house in the ethnic Albanian-populated village of Qyshk/Cuska.

Pristina Basic Court on Tuesday sentenced former police officer Zlatan Krstic to 14-and-a-half years in prison and former police inspector Destan Shabanaj to seven years for their roles in a deadly attack on Kosovo Albanian civilians during the war.

A Greek police spokesperson has brushed aside reports that a convicted fugitive, Christos Pappas, from the far-right Golden Dawn party, may be hiding out in a Serbian monastary.