Ljubenić massacres
The Ljubenić massacres were a series of killings committed by Serbian police and paramilitary forces on Kosovo Albanians in the in the village of Ljubenić (alb. Lybeniq) near Peć, during the Kosovo War 1998-1999.
On 25 May 1998 at least eight villagers of Ljubenic, mostly Hamzaj family members, were extrajudicially executed by the Serbian police.
On 1 April 1999 Ljubenic was the site of a mass [...] of about 66 men.
First massacre
At around 6:45am on 25 May 1998 there was an incident on the road between Dečani and Peć near the village of Ljubenic in which a civilian car was shot at by armed men, supposedly Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) members. Three men travelling in the car were hit by the bullets, including the driver, a police officer and a reserve police officer, who was apparently off-duty.
That afternoon, sometime after 1pm, a large police forces with various vehicles, some of which were armoured, arrived at Ljubenic. The Serbian police positioned themselves on the outskirts and started to fire at the Albanian part of the village using artillery and other weapons, before entering the village itself.
Most of the villagers had fled to the nearby forest. Those who could not flee sheltered in the houses as best they could. After a short while, police patrols conducted house to house searches. In one large house a group of about 14 people was sheltering. The police officers forced them into the yard and then separated the men from the women and children. The women and children were forced to run away after being threatened. The police then started to beat the men, who were unarmed, and then ordered them to run and shot them while they were running. Altogether four men were killed this way: Ibrahim Hamzaj (64), Imer Hamzaj (53), Dervish Hamzaj (51) and Bashkim Hamzaj (23).
The police had also entered the house of Zeqë Hamzaj (aged 68 years). They took him and his sons, Gani Hamzaj (25) and Rifat Hamzaj (24) out of the building, made them strip to their underwear, beat them and killed them. Another man, Haxhi Goga (22) from the town of Decani, who was a guest of one family, was also extrajudicially killed.
Second massacre
On 1 April 1999 Serbian police and paramilitaries entered Ljubenic. Many villagers tried to flee to the mountains but soon realized that they were surrounded. The villagers were gathered in the centre of the Ljubenic, men and women were separated, and a large group of men were stood up against a wall on the main street through the village. After a series of insults, all the men were ordered to lie down, and the Serbian forces began shooting. After they gunned male villagers with machine-gun fire, they shot in the head those who were still moving.
Some of the men survived under the corpses and crawled out after the Serbs had gone. The other villagers, mostly women and children were forced to left the village and walked to the Albanian border via Djakovica. The houses in the village of Ljubenić have had been torched.
An Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) team documented the traces of the killings on 1 July and conducted several interviews with survivors. Reportedly, about 66 Kosovo Albanians were killed.
See also
- List of massacres in Yugoslavia
See also
- Kosovo War
- War crimes in the Kosovo War
- List of massacres in the Kosovo War
External links
sh:Masakri u Ljubeniću