28 years after the murder of four boys, the Crime Institute receives the testimony of Sheremet Sejdiu

After the publication of the chronicle in KOHA about the murder of Sheremet Sejdiu's four sons, 28 years after this crime, the testimony of the 83-year-old from Qirezi was heard for the first time by the Institute for War Crimes in Kosovo. Sediu said he is pleased that his testimony has been documented.

Eighty-three-year-old Sheremet Sejdiu has had to wait 28 years for his testimony about the four sons killed during the war to be documented. While he has told his story to every visitor for nearly three decades, he has waited for it to be revealed to the state. 

For the first time on Thursday, he spoke about the day of February 28, 1998, when he found his sons killed in the yard of their house after the massacre that Serbian forces carried out in Qirez and Likoshane, before representatives of the Institute for War Crimes in Kosovo (IKKL).

And he has qualified this with high value.

"For me, there is no pay to have these preserved in documents. My word is one thing, the testimonies that have been living facts are another. For 28 years, maybe I am wrong," he said after the testimony given from his home.

A few days after the broadcast of the chronicle on KOHA, in which Sheremet Sejdiu had confessed about the day his four sons were murdered, the Institute for War Crimes in Kosovo received his testimony about everything he saw and experienced during the war.

Blerim Halili, head of the Academic Research Division at the IKKL, said that Sejdiu's confession will serve to document the war crimes that were committed in Kosovo.

"Uncle Sheremet's confession will undoubtedly be preserved in the institute's archive, with the highest state protocols, and will serve in the future for future generations as a basis, as an important reference for the development of various research on the crimes committed by Serbia in Kosovo," Halili emphasized.

He said that the time gap since the war period represents one of the main challenges in this process.

"The institute does not rely solely on one source of information, but the interviews, although they do not have the quality or sufficient details as we would have had in, for example, 2000 or 2005 when the period was closer to the war, nevertheless even now that we are conducting them, they have a special weight and they are combined with other information that the institute possesses," he said.

The Institute for War Crimes is also awaiting testimony from the wife of Sheremet Sejdiu's eldest son, who was present when Serbian forces killed his four sons. It is also expected to conduct further interviews with citizens in Likoshane and Qirez, where 28 years ago Serbian police killed unarmed women, elderly men, and young men in their backyards.

The massacre in Likoshane and Qirez, in which 24 people were killed, is the first of those that the Serbian state committed in Kosovo during the war of 1998 and 1999.