A report by Agence-France Presse news agency on August 13, 1999 said that the victims exhumed by United Nations forensics experts near Rakosh/Rakos are believed to have been prisoners who were killed at Dubrava Prison near Istog/Istok. The dates of their deaths are believed to have been around May 20, shortly after NATO bombed the prison, as later confirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY.

According to a report by Human Rights Watch, all the graves in Rakosh/Rakos were marked KPD, which stands for Kazneno Popravni Dom (Penal Correctional Facility) in Serbian.

The burial site is some 15 minutes’ drive from Dubrava Prison, Kosovo’s largest detention facility, not far from the border with Montenegro. The prison had three buildings that could house more than 1,000 inmates.

During its air campaign against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s regime in spring 1999, NATO bombs struck the prison twice, on May 19 and 21, killing an estimated 19 inmates. NATO claimed there was military activity in the direct vicinity.

Over the following days, as many as 97 inmates, all ethnic Albanians, were also killed by the Yugoslav forces, according to the Human Rights Watch NGO.

Witnesses said that the day after the second NATO strike, hundreds of prisoners were assembled on the prison’s sports field and Serbian police and prison guards opened fire and threw grenades at them.

In the hours that followed, prisoners who had hidden themselves inside the building were also hunted down and killed, according to eyewitnesses quoted by Human Rights Watch.

New York Times reporters visited the prison and reported in November 1999 that there were still “piles of abandoned clothes, drenched by months of rain but still giving off a stench of dead bodies. And in the basements of the buildings, the blood lies still sticky on the floor, bullet holes scar the walls, and impact marks of grenade explosions crater the floors.”

The Dubrava Prison massacre was investigated by international missions in Kosovo after the end of the war, but no indictment was issued as the perpetrators were believed to be in Serbia.

In 2010, the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre NGO filed a complaint to the Serbian prosecution accusing 34 people of being responsible for the murder of more than 90 ethnic Albanian prisoners and the wounding of more than 150 others.

Among those accused by the NGO were Serbia’s then justice minister Dragoljub Jankovic, his deputy Zoran Stevanovic and assistant police minister Obrad Stevanovic, as well as numerous named police officials and unidentified members of the Kosovo police force, prison management staff and guards. The Humanitarian Law Centre called for an investigation of suspicions that they planned, organised, ordered and participated in the killing of unarmed ethnic Albanian prisoners, as well as destroying evidence of the crime and hiding the direct perpetrators. The men who were accused insisted they were not guilty.

The Serbian war crimes prosecutor’s office announced in April 2012 that it was investigating the killings. A source in the Belgrade prosecution told BIRN that a number of senior state and police officials were interrogated in Serbia as potential suspects. However, no one has been indicted in Serbia so far.

In November 2023, a Serb who was only identified by the initials G.M. was indicted for alleged involvement in the massacre.

“The defendant is accused of participating in the murder of 109 prisoners and the injuring of 108 other prisoners, all of Albanian nationality [ethnicity], on May 22, 1999 in the ‘Dubrava Massacre’,” the prosecution said.

The Kosovo authorities have installed a monument in the yard of Dubrava Prison to commemorate those who were killed. A commemorative event is held every year at the prison on the anniversary of the killings.