Pjetër Shala has been given an 18-year prison sentence for crimes committed during his country's 1999 war of independence.
ADVERTISEMENTJudges at a European Union-backed court convicted a former Kosovo Liberation Army fighter on Tuesday for the murder of one person and the illegal detention and torture of nearly 20 more during his country's war of independence in 1999.
Pjetër Shala, also known by the nickname "Wolf", was found guilty of three war crimes — murder, torture and arbitrary detention — by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, a court that is part of the Kosovo legal system but based in the Netherlands. He was sentenced to 18 years of imprisonment.
Shala was acquitted of a charge of cruel treatment because the trial panel said the mistreatment was the same as that covered in the torture charge.
At his trial, which opened in February last year, Shala insisted he was innocent and pleaded not guilty to all four charges.
Presiding Judge Mappie Veldt-Foglia said Shala was involved in the mistreatment of several ethnic Albanian Kosovars who were perceived as spies or collaborators with Serbian forces in May and June 1999. The victims were detained and abused at a makeshift detention centre at a metal factory in Kukёs, northern Albania.
"The murder victim died while still in detention ... as a result of being shot, and subsequently being denied appropriate medical treatment, and the other detainees were forced to witness his terrible agony before he died," the judge said.
Veldt-Foglia said the judges received compelling eyewitness accounts of the abuse despite the trial being held against "a backdrop of a persistent climate of witness intimidation".
Specialist Prosecutor Kimberly West, who leads the office that indicted Shala, welcomed the verdicts.
"Achieving accountability for serious crimes — including against those, such as Mr Shala, who had previously avoided the jurisdiction of Kosovo's courts for several years — is an important step for the rule of law," West said in a statement.
Most of the people who died in the 1998-1999 war in Kosovo were ethnic Albanians. A 78-day NATO air campaign against Serbian troops ended the fighting, but relations between Kosovo and Serbia have been tense ever since, with the latter refusing to recognise the former's independence.