Murdered US Albanians’ Brother Warns Serbian PM

The brother of Ylli, Agron and Mehmet Bytyqi , who were killed in Kosovo 15 years ago by Serbian forces, warned Prime Minister Aleksander Vucic that the family would stir up controversy if no significant progress is made in the case before the Belgrade premier visits Washington.

Fatose Bytyqi said Vucic had promised the family on several occasions that he would not visit the US or meet President Barack Obama before there were important developments in the case.

“Visiting the United States or meeting with President Obama without such progress would be his third broken promise regarding the case. He has always expressed to me his personal commitment to seeing that my brothers’ murderers will be prosecuted – no matter who they are,” Bytyqi said on Thursday.

The latest promised he received from the Serbian government was that the case would be resolved by March this year, he said. The Serbian prosecution has also announced several times that it will resolve the case, but so far no indictments have been issued.

The Bytyqi brothers, US citizens of Albanian origin, joined a volunteer branch of the Kosovo Liberation Army called the Atlantic Brigades, which was active during the conflict with Belgrade’s forces in 1999.

Alongside other members of the Atlantic Brigades, who mainly came from the US, the brothers travelled to Kosovo to fight against Serbia. According to Fatose Bytyqi, after the July 1999 peace agreement that ended the Kosovo war, they then agreed to escort several Roma neighbours to Serbia.

But when they strayed over an unmarked boundary line near Merdare, they were arrested by Serbian police for illegally entering what was then Yugoslavia.

After serving their sentences, as they were leaving the Prokuplje district prison building, they were re-arrested, taken to a police training centre in Petrovo Selo, and detained in a warehouse there.

During the evening of July 9, 1999, they were tied up with wire by unknown persons and driven to a garbage disposal pit, where they were executed with shots to the back of the neck.

Their remains were exhumed in June 2001 from a mass grave in the village of Petrovo.

The Serbian war crimes prosecution indicted two police officers, Sreten Popovic and Milos Stojanovic, for allegedly transporting the brothers from Prokuplje to Petrovo Selo. In 2012, both men were acquitted.

During the trial, Stojanovic and Popovic claimed that they received the order to drive the brothers to Petrovo Selo from Vlastimir Djordjevic, who at the time was Serbia’s assistant interior minister.

Last year the Hague Tribunal sentenced Djordjevic to 18 years in prison for war crimes in Kosovo.

The initial investigation into the brothers’ killings, which was launched by the Serbian war crimes prosecution with assistance from the US, focused on three people: Djordjevic, Vlajko Stojiljkovic, a former interior minister who killed himself in 2002, and Goran Radosavljevic, the former commander of a special police unit and of the Petrovo Selo training centre.

Radosavljevic is now retired, but remains active in politics as a member of the executive board of Serbia’s ruling Progressive Party. He also runs several security companies.

He has been interrogated in relation to the Bytyqi brothers’ deaths, but no indictment has been issued. He has denied any involvement in the crime.

Serbia has been put under pressure by the US to resolve the case on several occasions – most recently in March by a government agency called the US Helsinki Committee, which said that the lack of progress in Bytyqi case demonstrated that justice had not been done.

The authorities were also criticised by the US ambassador for war crimes Stephen Rapp, who stated that Serbia needs to prosecute those who ordered the crime and that no American ambassador will cease pressurising Serbia until the case is resolved.

Vucic got an invitation to visit the US on April 9 from the US vice-president Joe Biden. The date of the visit has yet to be set.

BIRN