Kosovo indicts 20 over Gjakova war crimes, including Milan Radoicic
Indictment alleges killings, mass detention and looting during operations in May 1999; court has issued arrest warrants but suspects are reported as unavailable.
Kosovo’s Special Prosecution has filed an indictment charging 20 people with war crimes committed in Gjakova during 1998–1999, and the list of the accused includes businessman and former deputy leader of the Serbian List, Milan Radoicic.
The prosecution says the suspects, who acted in various capacities within Serbian interior ministry structures during the war, "are accused of participating in the killing of 107 civilians during a large military-police operation." It proposed that the trial be held in absentia because the accused are not accessible to Kosovo authorities.
According to the indictment and the arrest warrant issued by the Basic Court in Prishtina in April 2025, the operation in Gjakova took place between 7 and 10 May 1999. The court said investigators suspect the suspects were part of uniformed Serbian military and police forces who "entered houses and by force and threats pulled all those present out of their homes, separating the men from the women and children. They then killed 106 civilians of Albanian nationality."
"After the war, their bodies were found in a mass grave in Batajnica, in Serbia," the court added, and it also says the suspects allegedly detained and unlawfully imprisoned about 300 civilians of Albanian and other communities in improvised detention sites. Many of those detainees were later transferred to prisons in Kosovo and then to Serbia, from where they were released after June 1999 with international assistance, the warrant states.
Property seizures and earlier accusations
Kosovo authorities seized much of Radoicic’s property in Kosovo in April 2024. He has been a recurring figure in Kosovo investigations: in September 2023 he was accused, along with 42 others, of terrorism and endangering the constitutional order after an armed attack on a police patrol in the village of Banjska in which one officer was killed. Only three Kosovo Serbs have been arrested so far in connection with that attack; they have pleaded not guilty. Radoicic fled to Serbia and publicly accepted responsibility for leading the attack while saying he did so without notifying Belgrade authorities.
Belgrade prosecutors opened an investigation into Radoicic in September 2023 on suspicions of organizing an armed group and illegally transporting large quantities of weapons into Kosovo, among other serious public safety offences; he was questioned in October 2023 and denied guilt. He has also been linked by prosecutors to a corruption scandal in the Brezovica area of the Shar Mountain National Park, and in 2022 he narrowly avoided arrest when he attempted to enter Kosovo from Serbia.
Radoicic has previously been named as a leading figure in the criminal network allegedly behind the 2018 assassination of Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanović, together with businessman Zvonko Veselinović; neither was formally charged in that case. Commenting at the time on an arrest warrant against him, Radoicic said he was the target of a campaign directed at Serbs in Kosovo.
Photo: Andrej ISAKOVIC / AFP / Profimedia
