#PANDA CAFE TV#

He was ultimately released and was able to tell his family about the abuses he was subjected to in custody. In June 1999, Bajri and around 400 other prisoners were taken on buses to a prison in Leskovac in Serbia. The third time when I went for a visit, he collapsed without saying anything and they took him away,” she said. He told me he was fine, I told him the same about our family. “I saw he was black and blue from the beatings. Kimete Bajri was only able to talk to her son while he was being held in a detention centre in Peja/Pec. The youngest of them was 17 while the eldest was 22. Gazmend Bajrami, Xhevdet Bajrami, Agron Kollçaku, Vllaznim Pergjegjaj and Beqir Loxha were arrested for the murders alongside Behar Bajri.

#PANDA CAFE TV#

Some minutes later, our neighbours told us that they saw us on TV and that Behar was arrested for the killings in the ‘Panda’ case,” Kimete Bajri, now 70, told BIRN. “They tied Behar’s hands and took him with them. The Serbians were looking for her other son, Behar Bajri, who had joined the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army several months earlier. I was getting prepared to go to hospital to visit my son who was 13 at that time when I saw armed forces entering in the house,” recalled Kimete Bajri. In the Zatra neighbourhood of Peja/Pec early on December 17, 1998, a few days after the attack on the Panda Café, the Bajri family was woken up by the noise of three tanks and hundreds of Serbian troops. Hajdar Bajri, brother of one of the arrested youths, surveys the damage inside the long -closed Panda Café. Maybe this could be among the cases that have been investigated ,” Hoxha suggested. “We are still receiving files from EULEX. Syle Hoxha, the coordinator for media at the Special Prosecution, told BIRN that the Panda Café massacre is not in its list of open cases. Meanwhile Kosovo’s Special Prosecution, which has inherited all the serious crimes cases from the UN mission UNMIK and the EU rule-of law mission EULEX, could not confirm that it is investigating. President, who killed those children then?” Trifovic asked. “Nobody had any hope until came out and publicly said that himself. Ljubica Trifovic, the mother of the murdered Dragan Trifovic, says that she follows Vucic’s every public appearance, hoping to hear of a breakthrough in the investigation, despite not believing it will happen. But if there has been any genuine progress in the case, it has not been made public. Since then, there has been much speculation that the perpetrators could have been Serbian forces or state security operatives. Vucic has dropped vague hints that investigators are getting closer to finding the truth every year since 2013, when he first suggested there was no evidence that the massacre was committed by Kosovo Albanians. “We will not hide the truth, whether it’s Albanians or Serbs ,” he promised. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic repeated last month that an investigation was ongoing. Twenty years later, the perpetrators have still not been brought to justice, the families are still grieving, and some of the Kosovo Albanians who were wrongly arrested after the attack are still dealing with the psychological consequences of the abuses they suffered in custody. Two other 18-year-olds, Vlado Loncarevic and Nikola Rajovic, and the Panda Café’s owner, Mirsad Sabovic, were also were wounded in the shooting. Sixty bullets were fired, killing 15-year-old Ivan Obradovic, 16-year-old Vukota Gvozdenovic, 18-year-olds Svetislav Ristic, Zoran Stanojevic and Dragan Trifovic, and 24-year-old Ivan Radevic. The bullet holes all over the wall are an enduring testament to what happened on December 14, 1998, when gunmen opened fire inside the café, leaving six young Serbs dead and escalating the conflict in Kosovo, which at the time was still a province of Yugoslavia. The Panda Café, a small, drab coffee bar in the western Kosovo town of Peja/Pec, looks almost the same as it did 20 years ago.

Panda cafe