After a retrial, Pristina Basic Court on Monday sentenced Muhamet Alidemaj, a former Serbian policeman, to 13 years’ imprisonment for participating in a massacre at Izbice during the Kosovo war in March 1999.

Alidemaj had pleaded not guilty. In December 2025, he told the court: “I am one million per cent not guilty.”

In the first verdict on the case, on July 12, 2024, Alidemaj also similarly said that he was “not 100 per cent but 1,000 per cent” not guilty of the charges, claiming he had not even been in Kosovo from September 1998 to 2021.

The Pristina Basic Court had sentenced Alidemaj to 15 years of imprisonment but the Court of Appeals returned the case for retrial in August 2025. On Monday, the trial panel confirmed the verdict again.

The court established that, on March 18, 1999, Alidemaj entered the village of Izbice with other Serbian police and military forces. They then 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. They then forcibly separated women and children under 12 from the men and ordered the former to go to Albania.

The men were then divided into groups and about 130 of them were executed with automatic weapons. Only 12 managed to survive.

After the Kosovo war, the bodies were found in a mass grave at a police training centre in the Belgrade suburb of Batajnica in Serbia.

Prosecutor Ilir Morina, in closing statements on July 9, withdrew the second count of the indictment, which claimed that two months after the attack, the accused and other members of Serbian forces returned to the village, exhumed the bodies with an excavator and took them away.

The sentence can be appealed.