Peja/Pec

A Kosovo court has jailed Svetomir Bacevic for five years for taking a Kosovo Albanian woman from her home and mistreating her in the Peja/Pec municipality during the war in 1998.

Svetomir Bacevic, who is being tried for seizing a Kosovo Albanian woman from her home and mistreating her in the Peja/Pec municipality during the war in 1998, declined to enter a plea in court.

The Kosovo prosecution said on Monday that police have arrested a man identified only by the initials M.D. on suspicion of committing war crimes in the Peja/Pec region of Kosovo in May 1999.

There are two close to the bus station in North Mitrovica, several in Zvecan and others in a village of Zubin Potok.

But while, by law, security cameras directed at public streets should be the sole responsibility of Kosovo's police force, dozens observed by BIRN in three Serb-majority municipalities in the country's north are not apparently under anyone's control.

Svetomir Bacevic stands accused of seizing a 60-year-old ethnic Albanian civilian from her home in the village of Bellopje/Belo Polje in Kosovo's Peja/Pec municipality in the summer of 1998, according to the indictment which has been obtained by BIRN.

Haxhi Balaj remembers that it was sunny on May 5, 1999, and that his mother Shehrije was trying to find something for lunch for the family.

They had run out of flour, among the many other things they were missing in those difficult days during the Kosovo war.

Drilon Gashi, a young and unconventional cleric who served for two years as imam at the mosque in the village of Vitomirica in Kosovo's Peja/Pec municipality, said on Thursday that he has been dismissed by the Kosovo Islamic Community after he said he believed the theory of evolution developed by Charles Darwin.