Prizren

Kosovo's Institute of Forensic Medicine began a new exhumation of a suspected war grave this week in the mountain village of Koshare/Kosare in the west of the country as the authorities stepped up efforts to find around the remaining missing persons from the 1998-99 war.

Witness Shefki Bujari, who was the head of the village Duhel/Dulje for many years, told Remzi Shala's retrial at Prizren Basic Court on Wednesday that several murders during the Kosovo war, particularly in his village, could have happened because of personal resentments or suspicions that the victims were collaborating with Serbian forces.

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.

Bishop of Raka-Prizren Teodosije informed Mr. Matthew Palmer about the problems Serbian Orthodox Church in Kosovo is facing.
The Bishop especially spoke about the problems of our faithful people and saints in the light of the latest incidents and the refusal of Kosovo institutions to execute the decision of the Constitutional Court on the land of the monastery of Visoki Decani.

According to him, the video showed members of the so-called KLA who stand on the bodies of dead soldiers in Koare and dig the tombs in which they are buried. Odalovi told RTS that Koare may be one of the first locations in the area of Kosovo and Metohija for which it is suspected that the graves of the missing are located, and which will be searched.

Kosovo's state prosecution on Thursday pledged that a ruling on a criminal investigation into three people will be taken soon - hours after BIRN aired a TV investigation showing the payment of an alleged bribe of 5,000 euros to a prosecutor in Prizren to close a criminal investigation.

The lawsuit was filed by the law office from Nis, in cooperation with the Italian lawyer, who managed to prove that 70 Italian soldiers contracted cancer because of being exposed to depleted uranium during their stay in Kosovo.

The head of Kosovo's Missing Persons Commission, Kushtrim Gara, told BIRN that exhumations were carried out at ten locations in Kosovo and Serbia this year and "the mortal remains of at least 11 persons, victims of the war, were found and exhumed".

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.

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.