Over 2,000 people killed in war were buried without autopsy and DNA

Legal Medicine Institute Director Education Gerjaliu says these cases should be handled through a strategic plan, but that requires work by a super team and preliminary planning.

There are other cases to deal with, there are cases where family members have buried their relatives without DNA analysis and without autopsy, the number of such cases is over 2,000. Based on the Humanitarian Fund's book of memory from the total 15 thousand and 533 of those killed in Kosovo, so it should simply be a review of the cases and see where we are when we started in 2003, when the Office for Legal Medicine and Missing Persons was created under UNMIK administration, we have started somewhere with 4 thousand and 60 cases of persons who have been on the list of missing persons, and today we are 1647 that is more necessary to see the fate of the cases we have in the morgue, he said.

This is a very serious strategic plan that requires hard work, not a person's, but an entire and normal team that without a planning plan, we cannot approach this problem, but this planning is not in my domain because I answer only for the professional work done by the Legal Medicine Institute. But since I am now 20 years old in this process then the professionalism itself forces you to show the problems that have occurred in Kosovo within 20 years considering that this process has not been, and is now in the hands of locals”. He does not rule out the possibility of mistakes in such cases because of the work done in a classic manner.

There are several plans that have been proposed that have forced us to go back to 1999 that we don't have any action undertaken by institutions and that simply should be done in a classic approach or strategy which envisions a much more serious intervention and the return of the process, especially in the cases of The Hague Tribunal that are, in fact, over 4 thousand cases that have not worked on The Hague Tribunal Teams and that have been worked in a classic method and it is necessary to make DNA identification even because it is possible that a small percentage of them are also wrongly buried in the case of studies where they are not identified by the classical DNA in The Hague, but that their family members have not yet emerged at the time of the time. Gerjaliu told the online economy.

“There is no exception to the possibility of an error we've done earlier in Mitrovica, where out of 87 cases have proved 17 wrong, which means up to 20 percent were accidentally buried because it has been worked on the classic (4)x1> method. Gerjali in this interview has also told of the work done this year and the research results.

He says he's dug into 25 locations and 10 identifications have been handed to his family. During 2019 we have opened 25 locations in Kosovo, field work that we have priority in cases of the War Crimes Prosecutor's orders. We have worked in three locations which have been opened in Serbia, where staff has been standing for three weeks, and they have resulted in relative findings. During the 2019 period, we have handed over the new IDs to the total of 10 cases which have been handed over to family members, and of which 7 have been outside Kosovo territory, two have surrendered to the border with Serbia, given to the Commission of the Serbian Pella Workers Group and another 5 have surrendered to the border with Montenegro because they were Montenegrin citizens. The other cases are of Kosovo, handed over to family members”.

In this year, Gerjaliu says there have been about 18 reunions. We've had about 18 reunifications over this period, of which 13 have surrendered to the cases of 1999-2002, that means reuniting parts which have already been identified with DNA analysis from the mortar waste that we have in the institute's morgue. Even further, the number of mortore remains in the morgue is approximately 300, which does not mean it represents the number of persons because they can be reunited and some mortore remains to create a person. The same does not concern the blood giver of those families who have already given blood to”, Gerjaliu said.

About the samples found in the morgue of the Law Medicine Institute, which is about 300, says not all belonged to the recent war in Kosovo. He says those remains are being prepared and buried in a parcel in “Dragodan”. “These mortorial remains, about 300 are not all related to the last war, there are cases which are so-called old ones belonging to the oldest periods of the second or first world war, the same are being prepared and buried in the parcel divided at “Dradan”, which is decidically divided for this process and they will be buried at that site<5>, he said.