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"After the shooting, policemen entered the pizzeria. One of them said, 'he is alive, kill him'. After that, I heard one shot, but I did not dare look who they killed. After that, they started dragging the bodies of the killed and throwing them on a truck with a blue cover, which was parked in front of the building. They dragged me and Gramos, too. There were more than 40 dead people on the truck. It was going fast towards Prizren. Wounded Shureta Berisha was also on the truck. When we got close to the Ljutoglava village, at the curve on a rise, Shureta told us to jump. In that moment I did not dare do it, but she jumped. A little further, close to the bus station, I grabbed my son, closed my eyes, and jumped. The truck with the bodies of my daughter Dafina, son Driton, and mother-in-law Hava went on towards Prizren."
Belgrade, 27 October 2005.
After nine former and present members of the Serbian Ministry of Interiors were arrested for the murder of 48 civilians in Suva Reka, the Humanitarian Law Center demands a process begin that will establish the responsibility of those members of the Serbian Ministry of Interior against whom there are justified suspicions that they were involved in committing war crimes during the armed conflicts in the Former Yugoslavia. The massacre of Albanian civilians in Suva Reka, in which fourteen persons under the age of fifteen, including two babies, were killed, was committed on 26 March 1999. Their mortal remains were found at the police training range in Batajnica in 2001. More than six and a half years have passed since the massacre happened. However, it did not have any influence on the fact that most perpetrators of the crime are still active members of the Serbian Ministry of Interior and some of them are high-ranking officers in the Gendarmerie Command. That also leads to obstructions coming from the police itself in revealing the crimes in which their members were involved. According to the information collected by the Humanitarian Law Center in 2001 pertaining to the crime in Suva Reka, policemen in blue uniforms arrived early in the morning from the station in Suva Reka and started searching the houses of the local Albanians explaining that they were looking for weapons. After they started separating and killing men; women and children ran away towards the "Kalabrija" Pizzeria located in the Suva Reka shopping centre. Soon after that, the police members appeared at the door of this pizzeria and started shooting and throwing grenades at the civilians who were sitting and lying in the room. Vjolca Beri¹a gave a statement to the Humanitarian Law Center in which she said how she tried with her own body to protect her son Gramos, but they were both wounded in the shooting. "After that, I told my son to pretend to be dead", Vjollca Berisha stated saying they were all covered in the killed people’s blood.
"After the shooting, policemen entered the pizzeria. One of them said, 'he is alive, kill him'. After that, I heard one shot, but I did not dare look who they killed. After that, they started dragging the bodies of the killed and throwing them on a truck with a blue cover, which was parked in front of the building. They dragged me and Gramos, too. There were more than 40 dead people on the truck. It was going fast towards Prizren. Wounded Shureta Berisha was also on the truck. When we got close to the Ljutoglava village, at the curve on a rise, Shureta told us to jump. In that moment I did not dare do it, but she jumped. A little further, close to the bus station, I grabbed my son, closed my eyes, and jumped. The truck with the bodies of my daughter Dafina, son Driton, and mother-in-law Hava went on towards Prizren. I do not know how it happened that we stayed alive. We crawled to a field. A little further from that place, I spotted a group of people in a yard. I raised my hand and asked for help. One older lady approached me. I could recognize by her clothes that she was a Serb. She brought us water and she gave sherbet to my son. She did not ask us anything and neither did I speak. She took us to another house, to an Albanian called Mehmet.
There they bandaged our wounds and gave us some clothes to change. When we returned to Suva Reka, after the NATO deployment in Kosovo, we saw our houses had been burnt".
Bodies of the killed civilians were buried at the military shooting range near Prizren. However, some ten days later, the bodies were transferred to the mass grave located at the Special Counterterrorism Unit's (SAJ) range in Batajnica from which 1,100 bodies of Kosovo Albanians were exhumed. In view of the fact that the authorities in charge have had all information on the perpetrators of the crime in Suva Reka for five years, as well as information on the perpetrators of other crimes committed by the military and police forces in Kosovo, the tardiness in resolving these cases points to the complicity of the highest state authorities in the crimes committed.
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