Cikatove e Vjeter/Staro Cikatovo
Suhareka/Suva Reka
The two mass graves that lie in green fields close to the village graveyard in Suhodoll i Poshtem/Donji Suvi Do and Suvi Do in the North Mitrovica municipality were initially discovered in 1999. They were further exhumed in 2017 and 2022.
The gravesites, one street apart, yielded 131 bodies. Seventy of them were found in the location right to the village graveyard and 61 in the green field down the road. Both locations are unmarked.
The victims buried there were killed by Serbian forces during the spring of 1999 during their wartime campaign against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
The mass grave location remains unmarked.
The first preliminary excavations of the sites were carried out immediately after the war by French soldiers serving with the NATO peacekeeping mission KFOR.
According to a US government report, citing information from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY and media reports, a forensic team then uncovered the bodies of 72 Kosovo Albanians who were shot from close range.
In March 2022, Kosovo’s Special Prosecution charged Muhamet Alidemaj with war crimes, accusing him of being part of a group of Serbian police and troops who killed 130 Albanian civilians in the village of Izbice/Izbica near Skenderaj/Srbica.
According to the indictment, on March 18, 1999, Alidemaj and others forced a villager to lead them on a search of her house at gunpoint, slapped her, stole 1,000 German marks from her and set her property on fire.
The indictment further claimed that Alidemaj and the others violently separated women and children under 12 years old from men and ordered them to leave for Albania.
The men were divided into groups and around 130 of them were executed with automatic weapons. Only 12 managed to survive.
Two months after the attack, Alidemaj and other members of Serbian forces are alleged to have returned to the village, exhumed the bodies with an excavator and took them away, according to the indictment. Alidemaj denied the charges against him and pleaded not guilty.
After the war, some of the victims of the Izbice/Izbica massacre were found in the mass grave in Suhodoll i Poshtem/ Donji Suvi Do, while others were found in other mass graves in Novolan near Vushtrri/Vucitrn and at a Serbian police training centre in Batajnica, near Belgrade.
