Human remains found at Mala Kaludra dig in Kosovo

The exhumation at Mala Kaludra, a village in the municipality of Zubin Potok in northern Kosovo, began on Tuesday, July 28, and produced a find on its first day. The Institute of Forensic Medicine said that, on its team’s initial assessment, human remains of forensic significance had been recovered at the site. Footwear was found alongside them.

None of the remains have been identified. An autopsy, DNA testing and further forensic work come next, and that is a process measured in weeks and months rather than days.

The Basic Court in Pristina ordered the exhumation, autopsy and identification at the request of the Special Prosecution of Kosovo, as part of two separate criminal investigations. Kosovo Police, the Institute of Forensic Medicine, the Government Commission on Missing Persons and the War Crimes Investigation Directorate are all working the site.

The prosecution said in a statement:

The process is being carried out in line with the court order and with professional and international standards for the identification of remains and the preservation of evidence, with the participation of the competent institutions and relevant experts.

Spokeswoman Arbnora Luta told reporters that “at the request of the Special Prosecution and the Basic Court in Pristina, the competent institutions are carrying out the order”. The prosecution added that it would release information only to the extent that it does not jeopardise the criminal case, the identification process or the rights of the victims’ families.

Who are the missing men in the Intellectuals case?

The remains are suspected to belong to a group of 23 Albanians, most of them from the Mitrovica area, who were abducted in April 1999 in the Kaludra area of Zubin Potok municipality. The case is known in Pristina as the Intellectuals group, and it has sat among the unresolved missing persons files for more than two decades.

Kosovo Police said in a statement that the two men arrested this week are suspected of a crime against the civilian population during the 1999 war, in which 23 Albanian civilians were killed.

The arrests that came one day earlier

We reported on those arrests yesterday. The day before the digging started at Mala Kaludra, Kosovo Police detained Momir Jaksic and Miljko Bisevac. The Special Prosecution held them for up to 48 hours and they were then remanded in custody. According to the Serbian government’s Office for Kosovo and Metohija, whose account Belgrade media have carried, five Serbs in total were taken to Pristina for questioning, and three residents of the village of Crepulja were released after an interview that ran late into the night.

The same office tied the police operation to the demolition of Serb-owned holiday homes at Lake Gazivode a week earlier, and called it pressure on the Serb community. Pristina treats the case as routine investigative work by the prosecution service that handles war crimes.

Politics reached the site before the forensics did

Acting Interior Minister Xhelal Svecla, Kosovo Intelligence Agency director Petrit Ajeti and Local Government Administration Minister Elbert Krasniqi all visited the dig. Svecla told reporters the search would not stop.

We will not be calm or satisfied until we find the last missing person and until everyone responsible is punished.

He also said that “Serbia must pay the price of genocide, it must not be pardoned”. That put a political label on a case that, at that moment, was still at the stage of a first forensic assessment, with no one yet able to say whose remains had been found.

What comes next is technical and slow: an autopsy, DNA comparison against samples from the families of the missing, and only then a formal identification. Until that point there is a find at one location and two men in custody, and everything beyond that is a claim made by one side or the other.