KLA war crimes case goes to retrial

SERBIA

The Supreme Court of Serbia has overturned a verdict that set Sinan Morina, charged with war crimes, free. The ethnic Albanian was a member of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

Now the case has been returned to the first-degree court for a retrial.

The statement from the Supreme Court in Belgrade on Tuesday said that it accepted the War Crimes Prosecution appeal, which challenged the “regularity and completeness of the ascertained factual circumstances”.

Morina was released at the end of 2007, after facing a trial for taking part in attacks, imprisonment and deportation of civilians, burning and looting of their property and of religious structures in the village of Opteruša near Orahovac in Kosovo.

The crimes he allegedly took part in happened in 1998, a year before war broke out in the province.

But Morina claimed that he was in fact in Germany in the summer of 1998. The suspect was apprehended by Montenegrin police as he was traveling back from Germany to Kosovo, and was extradited to Serbia.

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