Kosovo/Kosova As Seen, As Told January 1999 to the abduction of a Serb police man from Stimlje in early December 1998. He maintained that the tension in Racak had built up and that the colleagues of this policeman had reacted in such a furious way because of the abduction. (The mass killing at Racak, and the chain of events leading up to it, are described in more detail in Part V, under Stimlje municipality.) On 14 March five Kosovo Albanian males from the village Hoca Zagradska/Hoca e Qytetit in Prizren municipality were cutting wood when they encountered five Serbian policemen. One man who was able to escape but was too frightened and in fear for his life to take the OSCE-KVM to the scene of the incident gave details as follows. The five men left the village of Grejkovce/Grejkoc (Suva Reka/ Suhareke) at 07:00 hours on 14 March to cut wood. At approximately 14:30 hours on their way home five policemen shot at them. One man was shot in the face and as the group took cover the injured man was arrested. The policemen ran after the others and killed two of them; another man pretended to be dead and later escaped. He did not know the fate of the fourth man or of the man who was arrested. When an older man from the village took the OSCE-KVM team to the scene of the incident they found the bodies of the four victims and shell casings from an automatic rifle lying near the bodies. A small back-pack containing bread and meat and two axes for cutting wood were also found nearby. Suspicious deaths in custody. Suspicious deaths of persons in police custody, as a result of torture and illtreatment, were an established phenomenon before the time of the OSCE-KVM deployment (see the references to this in Chapter 6, Torture and ill-treatment and Chapter 10, Violation of the right to a fair trial), but the OSCE-KVM during its deployment inside Kosovo dealt with fewer cases where suspicions deaths appeared to have occurred in police custody, than with killings that could not be attributed. One particular case where a detainee died while presumably in police custody occurred on 8 March 1999 when a 20-year-old Kosovo Albanian man was driving to the Suncani Breg/Bregu i Diellit district of Pristina/Prishtina. At a traffic light police stopped the car, dragged the man out and drove him to Police Station No. 92 (for which see also Part V, entry for Pristina/Prishtina city). The police informed the relatives that their son would be released within the next few hours. The father of the detainee reportedly spent the whole night in front of the police station and waited the next day until 15:00 hours. He was later informed that the dead body of his son had been found with 33 bullet wounds near the bridge in Donje Dobrevo/Miradi e Ulet (Kosovo Polje/Fushe Kosove). Another man saw the victim's car on 9 March around 15:00 hours full of bullet holes near the Police Station No. 92. The OSCE-KVM examined the dead body on 10 March, but the circumstances of the death remained unclear. The information available, however, suggests that the police executed him extra-judicially. UCK killings of Serb civilians or of suspected Albanian "collaborators" The examples given below are illustrative of the general patterns in evidence in killings perpetrated by the UCK, and are not exhaustive. In Bukos/Bukosh (a mixed village 4 km west of Vucitrn/Vushtrri town) in February 1999 two Kosovo Serb residents were abducted by the UCK, as notified to the OSCE-KVM by police. After the abduction http://www.osce.org/kosovo/documents/reports/hr/part1/ch5.htm (3 of 15)12/5/2003 11:50:53 AM