Zubin Potok: Pristina Court Upholds Detention of Nine Serbs
Defense lawyers sought release, house arrest and bail, but received the decision only in Albanian. The nine are suspected of a 1999 war crime.
The Court of Appeals in Pristina has rejected the appeals filed by defense lawyers for nine Serbs from the municipality of Zubin Potok, leaving in place the detention that a lower court ordered for them in late September. The written decision reached the defense lawyers on October 9, 2026. The Serbs were arrested on September 27 on suspicion of taking part in a war crime committed in 1999.
What did the court decide on the appeals?
A pretrial judge at the Basic Court in Pristina ordered one month of detention for the nine, after which their lawyers appealed to the Court of Appeals. That court rejected the appeals and confirmed the first-instance ruling.
According to attorney Jelena Krivokapic, who represents one of the arrested men, the defense asked that the suspects be allowed to defend themselves while free. As alternatives it proposed house arrest and other milder measures, and it also offered bail and a mortgage as guarantees. The court accepted none of the proposals.
“We asked that they be allowed to defend themselves while free, and if that was not accepted, we proposed house arrest and other alternative measures,” Krivokapic said.
The court’s reasoning is not yet known. The ruling was delivered to the defense lawyers solely in Albanian, so Krivokapic cannot say what grounds the Court of Appeals gave. “Once we receive the ruling in Serbian, we will know what the reasoning says,” she told reporters.
What are the nine charged with?
The arrests were carried out at the request of the Kosovo Special Prosecutor’s Office, in an operation code-named Dossier 23. The case concerns a war crime against the civilian population: the disappearance and killing of 23 Albanian civilians on April 19, 1999. The case is publicly known as the “Group of Intellectuals,” and the victims are said to have disappeared from the Mitrovica and Srbica regions.
According to the prosecution, the suspects, as members of the Territorial Defense and together with other persons known to the prosecutors, were mobilized and armed in the village of Mala Kaludra. There, the prosecution alleges, they rounded up a group of 23 Albanian civilians, first robbed and mistreated them, and finally killed them. The prosecution also says the civilians were detained, beaten and abused, and that the suspects then tried to burn the bodies with gasoline. These are the prosecution’s allegations, and guilt has not been established. The suspects are charged with an alleged offense.
Twelve suspects are named in the case, not nine. The sources do not say which of them are currently in detention, so names cannot be matched to the men arrested.
How did the arrests in Zubin Potok come about?
The arrests followed a discovery in August of this year, when a mass grave was found in the area of the villages of Kaludra and Jabuka in the municipality of Zubin Potok. Pristina links the human bones found in Mala Kaludra to this case.
The September 27 operation continues earlier arrests in the same municipality. Over the past several months a total of 13 people from Zubin Potok have been arrested in connection with the find in Mala Kaludra. According to RTS, the nine men arrested from several villages are the largest group of Serbs taken into custody in Kosovo in a single day on suspicion of war crimes.
