Kosovo’s Special Prosecution on Thursday said it has filed an indictment charging 20 people it suspects of committing war crimes against civilians in the western town of Gjakove/Djakovica during 1999.

BIRN has learned that Milan Radoicic, a well-known Kosovo Serb businessman and politician, is among the suspects.

The prosecution said that, according to the indictment, during the 1998-1999 war in Kosovo, the suspects, operating in different capacities of the Serbian Interior Ministry, “are accused of participating in the killing of 107 civilians during a large-scale military-police operation.

“During this operation … the defendants initially separated the women and children from the men. The women were robbed, taking their gold jewellery, money and other valuables, while the men were executed, some in their homes and yards, some at a location known as ‘Taliqi Bridge’. The houses were also burned,” the Prosecution added.

It proposed a trial in absentia for the defendants since they are all out of reach of Kosovo’s authorities.

In April 2025, the Pristina Basic Court issued an arrest warrant for Radoicic and 19 others suspected of war crimes in May 1999 in Gjakova/Djakovica.

The court said the Special Prosecution was investigating suspicions that from May 7 to May 10, 1999, the suspects were among uniformed Serbian military and police forces who “entered houses and using force and threats took everyone present out of their homes and separated the men from women and children. Later they killed 106 civilians of Albanian nationality.

“After the war, their bodies were found in a mass grave in Batajnica in Serbia,” the court added.

The court said it suspected that Radoicic and the 19 others “arrested and imprisoned 300 other civilians from the Albanian community and other ethnic communities, who were first kept in improvised prisons” and treated inhumanely.

Many of these prisoners were transferred to prisons in Kosovo and eventually to Serbia, to be released after June 1999 with the assistance of the international community, the arrest warrant notes.

“All the Albanian civilians and civilians and of other nationalities who lived in Gjakova were barred from their home via force and threats. First, all the houses of Albanians in Gjakova were robbed and then burned, causing material damage,” it added.

The court noted that the suspects do not have addresses in Kosovo and are not accessible to the Kosovo authorities.

Charged multiple times

Radoicic is well known to the Kosovo authorities. They have charged him with multiple crimes, or listed him as the main suspect a number of times, but have not so far been able to bring him to court.

Together with 42 individuals, he was charged with terrorism and endangering the constitutional order of Kosovo over the attack by armed Serbs on a police patrol in the Kosovo village of Banjska in September 2023, which left one police officer dead.

Only three Kosovo Serbs have been arrested related to the attack. They have pleaded not guilty. Radoicic, who since fled to Serbia, took responsibility for leading the assault but insisted he did so without informing the authorities in Belgrade.

At the time of the attack, Radoicic was deputy leader of Srpska Lista, the main Serb party in Kosovo, which operates closely in line with Serbia’s government,

Serbia launched an investigation into Radoicic in September 2023, when the Belgrade Higher Prosecutor’s Office said it was probing him for organising an armed group, the unauthorised amassing of a large cache of weapons, which he transported to Kosovo, and for “serious crimes against general security”.

Belgrade prosecutors questioned him in October 2023, when he reportedly claimed innocence.

In April 2024, the Kosovo authorities seized most of Radoicic’s property in the country.

Prosecutors there also implicated him in a corruption scam in Brezovica in the Sharr Mountains National Park. He narrowly avoided arrest in 2022 when he tried to cross from Serbia into Kosovo, but turned back at the last second.

Commenting at the time on the warrant issued against him, Radoicic suggested he was a victim of a campaign against Serbs in Kosovo.

Radoicic was earlier named as the main leader of the criminal group that organised the murder of the Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic, in 2018, together with businessman Zvonko Veselinovic. The men were never charged.

In an interview with BIRN a few months before his murder, Ivanovic named Radoicic as the real power-holder in the Serb-majority north of Kosovo.