Kosovo court jails rebel commander for 26 years

Kosovo court jails rebel commander for 26 years

By Agencies

A special Kosovo court in The Hague found a former rebel commander guilty on Friday of murder and torture and jailed him for 26 years in its long-awaited first war crimes verdict.

Salih Mustafa, 50, was found guilty of abusing prisoners in a makeshift jail in a barn run by the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in the 1998-1999 independence war with Serbia.

The verdict comes at a sensitive time for Kosovo, where ethnic tensions have flared again nearly a quarter-century after the war, with attackers exchanging gunfire with police at the weekend.

“The panel sentences you to a single sentence of 26 years of imprisonment,” Judge Mappie Veldt-Foglia told Mustafa, who stood for the verdict and remained impassive.

Judges found that Mustafa led a guerilla group that kept at least six fellow ethnic Kosovo Albanians accused of collaborating with Serbs in a barn that was full of animal excrement.

Prisoners were beaten with baseball bats, iron batons, electrocuted, burned and denied food and water in the compound in Zllash, a village east of the capital Pristina.

Mustafa personally took part in beating two detainees.

One of the victims died, either as a result of being denied medical attention or left for advancing Serb troops to shoot dead, judges found.

He was found guilty of the war crimes of arbitrary detention, torture and murder. He was acquitted of a charge of cruel treatment because the same ground was covered by the torture charge, judges said.

“It constitutes the first war crimes judgment of this tribunal,” Veldt-Foglia said at the heavily secured court.

The court operates under Kosovo law but is based in the Netherlands and funded by the EU to shield witnesses from intimidation, given that former KLA commanders still dominate political life in Kosovo.

Mustafa, who was arrested in 2020 while working as an adviser at Kosovo’s defence ministry, denounced the “Gestapo” court when his trial opened last year.

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