here - Humanitarian Law Center/Fond za humanitarno pravo

decisive facts, and the reasons stated were for the most part unclear and contradictory to each
other. 141
The retrial opened on 20 March 2012, after the Higher Court in Belgrade had decided on 7 March
2012 to merge criminal proceedings against Fazli Ajdari, Rexhep Aliu, Shaqir Shaqiri, Shefket
Musliu, Sadik Aliu, Idriz Aliu, Shemsi Nuhiu 142 and Ramadan Halimi and the proceedings against
Agush Memishi, Faton Hajdari, Ahmet Hasani, Nazif Hasani, Samet Hajdari, Ferat Hajdari,
Kamber Sahiti, Selimon Sadiku and Burim Fazliju into one case.
14 trial days were held in 2012, during which the court, as suggested by the Court of Appeal,
examined the brother and sister-in-law of protected witness C1, who testified that C1 and C2 had
arrived in their apartment in Niš in June 1999.
Witness Darinka Đorđević (sister-in-law of C1), said C1 and C2 told her that they had been
queuing from bread in Gnjilane/Gjilan when taken out of the queue by two Albanians who then
took them to a forest, where they raped and beat them.
Witness Dragiša Đorđević (C1’s brother) testified saying that C1 had told him that two Albanians
in uniforms had taken her and C2 from a bread queue in Gnjilane/Gjilan and brought them in the
high school dormitory, where they raped and beat them for seven days.
At the retrial, the court accepted as evidence, for the first time, records of an autopsy performed
by ICTY investigators at the Institute for forensic medicine in Orahovac/Rahovec in July 2000.
The autopsy was performed on bodies that had been found in a container located in the
Gnjilane/Gjilan hospital campus and which had served as an ancillary mortuary. Among the
bodies found there were the bodies of Stojanče Mladenović and Zorica Mladenović, for whose
killing the defendants were charged.
Expert witness Professor Slobodan Savić submitted his finding and opinion regarding the autopsy
records. In his opinion, the record of the autopsies performed by ICTY investigators at the
Forensic Medicine Institute in Orahovac/Rahovec, reinforced his findings and opinion presented
during the first trial before the war crimes chamber. On the basis of the new documentation, the
expert witness could not conclude whether the bodies had been cut and mutilated post-mortem or
pre-mortem. He also indicated that there was no evidence indicating that the bodies had been
incinerated, since their bones were not charred. The time of death or the environment in which
the bodies were held before exhumation and autopsy cannot be determined. The expert witness
reiterated that the bodies indeed were cut post-mortem, but only to provide samples for DNA
testing, something corroborated by ICTY documentation.
141 For more details on the Court of Appeal’s ruling in this case, see the Report on War Crimes Trials in Serbia in
2011, HLC, p. 52.
142 On 21 March 2012, defendant Shemsi Nuhiu was extradited to Serbia from Switzerland under an arrest warrant
issued for him by the Serbian MUP.
63