Kosovo’s Panda Café Massacre Mystery Unsolved 20 Years On

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic repeated last month that an investigation was ongoing. “We will not hide the truth, whether it’s Albanians or Serbs [who committed the crime],” he promised.

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.

Since then, there has been much speculation that the perpetrators could have been Serbian forces or state security operatives. But if there has been any genuine progress in the case, it has not been made public.

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.

“Nobody had any hope until [Vucic] came out and publicly said that himself [about progress in the case]. So Mr. President, who killed those children then?” Trifovic asked.

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.

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.

“We are still receiving files from EULEX. Maybe this could be among the cases that have been investigated [by the EU mission],” Hoxha suggested.

Six youths wrongly arrested and tortured

Hajdar Bajri, brother of one of the arrested youths, surveys the damage inside the long -closed Panda Café. Photo: Serbeze Haxhiaj/BIRN.

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.

“It was seven in the morning. 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.

The Serbians were looking for her other son, Behar Bajri, who had joined the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army several months earlier.

“They tied Behar’s hands and took him with them. 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.

Gazmend Bajrami, Xhevdet Bajrami, Agron Kollçaku, Vllaznim Pergjegjaj and Beqir Loxha were arrested for the murders alongside Behar Bajri. The youngest of them was 17 while the eldest was 22.

Kimete Bajri. Photo: Serbeze Haxhiaj/BIRN.

Kimete Bajri was only able to talk to her son while he was being held in a detention centre in Peja/Pec.

“I saw he was black and blue from the beatings. He told me he was fine, I told him the same about our family. The third time when I went for a visit, he collapsed without saying anything and they [prison officers] took him away,” she said.

In June 1999, Bajri and around 400 other prisoners were taken on buses to a prison in Leskovac in Serbia. He was ultimately released and was able to tell his family about the abuses he was subjected to in custody.

“They forced him to eat soap, put salt in the wounds, held him without eating for days and keep him in a room with corpses of people who died due to torture,” said Kimete Bajri.

Vllaznim Pergjegjaj, then 19, was the last of the six young Albanians who were arrested in the night between December 17 and 18, at his house in the village of Vitomirica.

“I was sleeping when the police came. I didn’t know what was happening. I heard about the ‘Panda’ shootings two days earlier in the news. I heard the police speaking on the radio saying that ‘we have arrested the last suspect, don’t touch his family’,” Pergjegjaj told BIRN.

He claimed that the Panda Café attack was used as a pretext for Serbian forces to attack Kosovo Albanian villages. “After this case, we saw massacres in Qyshk, Lubeniq, Pavlan and Zahaq. Panda was a prelude for what happened to Albanian civilians,” he said.

Pergjegjaj said the six suspects were constantly tortured from January to June 1999 at the detention centre in Peja/Pec. “We were six people in the same room and we were sleeping on top of the blood. The toilets were [also] full of blood,” he recalled.

When they were transferred to the prison in Leskovac, the abuse worsened, he said.

“There is no method of violence we didn’t suffer during our time in Leskovac. The hardest was when we heard the cries of others who were suffering torture. It was harder than suffering the beatings. A young man from [the Kosovo town of] Istog was tortured and he died. In the evening they brought the corpse into the room. The body was bleeding all through the night,” he said.

“Behar [Bajri] was in the most difficult situation. He was beaten up even when he collapsed,” he added.

People were also allowed in from outside the prison to assault or humiliate the six young suspects. “They kept bringing children in and told them: ‘Look at those terrorists who killed your brothers in Kosovo.’ I saw anger in their faces,” he said.

As a result of the torture, one of the six men, Gazmend Bajrami, confessed to the murders.

But in November 1999, a court in Serbia found all six of them not guilty because of a lack of evidence. The murder charges were dropped and they were sentenced to one year in prison each for breaching public order legislation. One month afterwards, they returned home.

Kimete Bajri said that when they came back, her son was visibly debilitated by the experience. “He was like a dead man walking,” she says.

Since then, his mental health kept on deteriorating year after year, and now he has become a heavy burden on his family. “We cannot keep him under control, he is aggressive and often beats us up. A week ago he assaulted me with an axe,” Kimete Bajri said, showing a plastic bag full of medications for her son’s treatment.

Each year when anniversary of the Panda Café attack approaches, his behaviour changes, his mother added.

One night, relatives found him sleeping in front of the Panda Cafe, which now looks abandoned. “Recently he has been going to that place more often,” Kimete Bajri said.

Pergjegjaj, who is now a finance officer at the Peja/Pec municipal administration, said that Bajri’s psychological problems are a constant reminder of what happened to the young Albanians 20 years ago.

“He walks through the city streets all day like a shadow. He doesn’t only remind me of the Panda case, he reminds the others as well.”

Massacre ‘brought suffering to Albanians and Serbs’

Hajdar Bajri inside the Panda Café: Serbeze Haxhiaj/BIRN.

When Behar Bajri’s younger brother Hajdar enters the Panda Café for the first time to speak to BIRN, he is trembling.

He was 13 and in hospital when the attack happened in 1998, but he remembers how he heard the shootings and the next day, saw lot of armed men from the hospital window.

“As a child, I was angry because my parents didn’t come to visit me [in hospital that day]. I did not imagine that these shootings would bring so much pain to my family for many years after,” he said.

The former owner of the café, Mirsad Sabovic, who was also wounded in the attack, fled to Belgrade in 1999. In 2012, he sold the premises and his house to his Albanian neighbour.

The new owner, Mustafe Vejsa, said that he would like to pull down the building. “This place only brings me bad memories and horror,” he said.

Vllaznim Pergjegjaj. Photo: Serbeze Haxhiaj/BIRN.

But Vllaznim Pergjegjaj disagreed: “It should remain as a memorial site for the people, a reminder of a crime which brought suffering to Albanians and Serbs.”

Pergjegjaj said that he would like to meet the relatives of young Serbs who were killed at the café.

“I am ready to go together with the families and lay flowers on their graves. We, both sides, are waiting for justice, even though I do not trust in the justice of the Serbian state,” he explained.

The Serbian Organised Crime Prosecutor’s Office launched its new investigation into the massacre in 2016.

The prosecution said in 2017 that it had questioned 34 witnesses, and was hoping to interview more and gather additional evidence before pressing charges. It did not reply to BIRN’s request for a comment by the time of publication.

Serbia’s former war crimes prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic, said that it was a fact that there were “almost no Albanians” in the Peja/Pec region at the time of the attack.

“We came to the conclusion that [Albanians] are not the perpetrators,” Vukcevic told BIRN. However, he added that the war crimes prosecution did not investigate the case, since it was outside of its jurisdiction.

Vukcevic said he does not believe that the new Serbian investigation will uncover the truth about who staged the attack on the Panda Café.

“That has nothing to do with time [passing since the attack], but with the resolve of those who are [investigating],” Vukcevic said.

Ljubica Trifovic, mother of the murdered Dragan Trifovic, also said that she has no faith in the investigation.

“[The investigators] are just reopening old wounds,” she said.

Trifovic now lives in Montenegro, while her son Dragan is still buried in the Orthodox Christian cemetery in Peja/Pec.

She said the cemetery is now “ruined and neglected”, and her son’s tombstone has been demolished, but she has no intention of moving his remains as long as she can still travel to Kosovo to visit the grave.

“He was killed there, so let him rest there,” she said.