Five Serbs have been placed in 30-day pre-trial detention by the Pristina Basic Court on war crimes charges for alleged involvement in the January 1999 massacre in Recak/Racak, which left 45 dead and sparked the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
Xhorxhina Bami
Kosovo Albanian mourners follow coffins covered with Albanian flags up a hill overlooking Recak/Racak in February 1999 as hundreds attended the funeral. Photo: EPA /Anja Niedringhaus.
The Pristina Basic Court has placed five former members of the Serbian police force into 30-day custody, it announced on Monday. The men are suspected of involvement in the January 15, 1999 massacre in Recak/Racak, which was the catalyst for the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia two months later.
“The Pristina Basic Court – Special Department, has decided on the request of the Special Prosecution of the Republic of Kosovo for the imposition of detention in the criminal case against the defendants N.P., S.J., B.P., S.M. and S.S., due to the well-founded suspicion that they committed the criminal offence of war crimes against the civilian population,” the court said.
The five suspects were arrested and remanded on Sunday.
Prosecutor Ilir Morina said in a press conference on Sunday after the arrests that the suspects “were part of the special units of the Serbian police at that time who participated in the January 15, 1999 action in Recak.
Morina told the media that the prosecution used publicly available video recordings and evidence from The Hague to try to identify all the perpetrators.
Serbian security forces surrounded and attacked Recak/Racak on the morning of January 15, 1999 and murdered 45 civilians. They entered the village and raided the houses one by one. Some villagers tried to hide, but were discovered, beaten, taken away and shot.
The Serbian authorities insisted the casualties were all fighters from the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA. William Walker, head of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission, visited the scene the following day and called it a “crime against humanity” and insisted that the victims were civilians.
The massacre became an important factor in NATO’s decision to launch air strikes on Yugoslavia two months later to force Yugoslavia President Slobodan Milosevic to pull his troops out of Kosovo.
The attack formed part of the Hague Tribunal prosecution’s indictment of Milosevic, but no verdict was ever delivered because he died in 2006 while in detention.
On Sunday, the Serbian government’s office for Kosovo described the arrests as “institutional violence”, accusing Kosovo Police and the Prosecutor’s Office of taking revenge on Serbs.
“What we are witnessing here is systematic political and institutional violence by Pristina, led by Kurti, whose sole objective is to expel and arrest Serbs. As a cover for its chauvinistic and anti-Serb policies, it uses accusations of alleged war crimes,” the Serbian office for Kosovo said.
The Belgrade-backed party representing Kosovo Serbs, Srpska Lista, also spoke out against the arrests on Sunday, writing on Facebook that they “represent a new wave of intimidation and persecution of Serbs … which aim to create an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty and additional pressure on the Serbian people.”
In December 2025, the special prosecution of Kosovo also filed an indictment against 21 other individuals for war crimes against the civilian population in Recak/Racak during the operation by Serbian police forces on January 15, 1999.
