Suva Reka survivor testifies

Suva Reka survivor testifies

The prosecution tendered into evidence a chart depicting the family tree of the witness, on which the names of 44 members of the Berisha family who had been killed were marked. Among them were fourteen children, three babies and fourteen women, including one who was nine months pregnant.

The house of the Berisha family was surrounded by armed and uniformed men who had run out of the nearby police station. It was on 26 march 1999. Six men were killed right there in the courtyard. Nexhat, the witness's husband, was among them. A police officer she knew as Miskovic ordered Nexhat to raise his hands and immediately shot him to death.

The other family members tried to flee, but they were stopped in front of a café near their house. The police forced some forty members of the Berisha family into the café. The witness, her two daughters – 16-year-old Majlinda and 14-year-old Herolinda, her two sons – 11-year-old Altin and Radon, a baby not yet two – were among them. The police then opened fire from automatic rifles and threw two hand grenades into the café. The witness estimates the shooting lasted 20 to 30 minutes.

The witness was wounded in her abdomen, shoulder, leg and back. She played dead, because the police fired at everyone that moved, as she recounted. Her son Altin was alive too, but the police noticed that and killed him before throwing his body together with the others into a truck.

Two other survivors were in the truck. All three of them jumped off somewhere on the Suva Reka-Prizren road. Local Albanians took them into the woods. A month later, they fled to Albania.

Since Berisha identified the killers as police officers, only the defense counsel of the police general Sreten Lukic cross-examined her. The defense counsel put it to her that the massacre in Suva Reka was in fact an act of revenge on the part of Milorad Miško Nisavić, wrongly identified by the witness as Misković. The reason for the revenge was because the OSCE mission had moved their office from his hotel to the ground floor of the Berisha family home, and he could no longer collect rent. The witness replied she was unaware of any conflict between the Berisha family and "the man Misković", advising the defense counsel not to question her about the motives for the crime, but the perpetrators.

Hotel owner Miško Nisavić was an agent of the Serbian State Security Service for the Prizren area. He has been indicted for the crime in Suva Reka together with seven other high-ranking police officers before the War Crimes Chamber in Belgrade.