Dragutin Naskovic, a wartime police commander in the eastern Kosovo village of Zheger/Zegra, in Gjilan/Gnjilane municipality, pleaded not guilty to war crimes charges on Tuesday at Prishtina Basic Court.

“I don’t feel guilty of any of the allegations I am charged with,” Naskovic told the court after the prosecutor read the indictment.

“I was not at the scene when the criminal charge happened. I was not even [police] commander in Zheger village. I was displaced to Novobrdo [Novoberde],” Naskovic added, referring to another village, some 35 kilometres away.

Ajshe Ferati, the prosecutor, said that Naskovic, during March to April 1999, as commander of a police sub-station in Zheger, “did not take any measure to prevent looting, deportations and the murder of 29 Albanian civilians”.

The indictment says that on March 30, 1999, Serbian police forces, some of them under Naskovic’s command, entered Zheger, which made Shaqir Ukshini, a local resident, leave his house in fear with some of his family to take shelter in a safer house.

When Ukshini returned home, he found his father killed and his mother missing. “Under stress and traumatised, he immediately went to Zheger police station to report the case and when he reached the station, he met the defendant and told him what happened… but the defendant, instead of helping him to find the victim, addressed Ukshini with the words: ‘She was killed too,’” the indictment says.

“Seeing that he could not find any help, the witness left the station and returned to the village in search of his mother who he found with her throat cut by a knife,” the indictment adds.

Naskovic is also accused over actions taken by Serbian forces in the neighbouring village of llashtice/Vlastice, where 13 civilians were killed between March 27and April 13.

Naskovic’s lawyer, Vasilije Arsic, called the charges baseless.

“He was partly the commander at the Zheger police station at the time, but he was not there for the entire time covered by the indictment. The defence will prove that the accusation is baseless and unfounded,” Arsic was quoted by the Serbian-language Kossev news website as saying.

Naskovic, 73, was arrested on September 15 but released a month later after depositing a 40,000-euros bail.