Fred Abrahams from the campaign group Human Rights Watch—who worked on reports about Kosovo during the conflict—told the war crimes and crimes against humanity trial of former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and three co-defendants at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague on Wednesday that the organization wasn’t able to conduct a detailed probe of alleged crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1998 due to a lack of access to crime scenes and to witnesses.
“We did not conduct an in-depth investigation,” Abrahams told the court in response to a question from defendant Kadri Veseli’s defence lawyer, Ben Emmerson.
Emmerson was asking about a Human Rights Watch report that claimed the KLA had murdered people in Glogjan in September 1998, although it was later that the bodies of victims murdered elsewhere were dumped in Lake Radoniq in Glogjan.
Abrahams said that the information in the report had been received by “Serbian officials” and was not supported by other first-hand sources, admitting that he would have changed the wording.
However, Abrahams insisted that the KLA’s operational zone commanders could have taken steps to stop any alleged crime committed by their guerrillas due to their effective control on the ground.
Thaci, Veseli, Rexhep Selimi, and Jakup Krasniqi are accused of bearing individual and command responsibility for crimes that were mainly committed against prisoners held at KLA detention facilities in Kosovo and neighboring Albania, including 102 murders.
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