Pristina court voids 12.5-year sentence, orders retrial

The Court of Appeals in Pristina has thrown out the first-instance verdict that sentenced Srdjan Lazovic from Leposavic to 12 years and six months in prison, and returned the case for retrial. The decision was made public late on July 31, five months after the sentence was handed down.

Lazovic was charged with a war crime against the civilian population in the area of Malisevo during the 1998 conflict. The Basic Court of the provisional institutions in Pristina found him guilty on February 3, 2026. His lawyer, Predrag Miljkovic, said the appellate panel accepted the defense arguments in full.

What the indictment alleged

The prosecution accused Lazovic of taking part in the arrests, mistreatment and expulsion of Albanian civilians from the village of Panorce in the Malisevo municipality. Throughout the trial the defense argued that he was not in that village on the day named in the indictment.

He was arrested on June 27, 2024, while returning from Raska to Leposavic with his family, and has been held in custody ever since. That is more than two years behind bars before the verdict against him legally ceased to exist.

Why did the witness testimony collapse?

The prosecution called seven witnesses. Four of them failed to identify anyone, and the remaining three, in the defense reading of the record, described a man whose features shifted from one statement to the next. “One of them says he knows him by his moles,” Miljkovic said.

About the same witness, the lawyer added: “he kept changing his statements, the moles were on the forehead, then on the cheeks, then there were more of them, then fewer.” When the defense showed him photographs, the witness revised his claim and said the moles could not be made out in the images.

The third witness, according to the defense, offered nothing sharper:

And the third witness knows him only by his hard face, as he put it himself, and a hard face is one of 1,000 morphological features a person can have.

The defense also pressed the panel on why the recognition stopped with one man. “That witness supposedly knows Srdjan, but does not recognize any of the other participants,” Miljkovic said.

A newspaper photograph as the main evidence

The weight of the case rested on a newspaper photograph in which Lazovic was allegedly visible, the lawyer said. The defense hired foreign forensic experts to examine the image and they concluded that Lazovic is not in it. The trial panel imposed a prison sentence even after that finding.

That gap between the expert analysis and the operative part of the verdict became the backbone of the appeal the higher court has now upheld.

What happens next

Overturning a verdict is not an acquittal. The file goes back to the trial court, the evidence is heard again, and the February sentence no longer has any legal effect. Lazovic has spent more than two years in pre-trial detention, roughly a sixth of the term that has just been annulled.

Pristina has said nothing about what happens to his custody after the July 31 ruling. No date has been announced for the start of the retrial, and no panel has been named to hear it.

For the family and the defense, it means the same proceeding all over again, with the same witnesses and the same photograph, two years on. For the court in Pristina, it means writing a second verdict that has to hold up on review, which the first one did not.