The Prime Minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti, together with the Government Commission on Missing Persons, has announced that 11 people who went missing during the last war in Kosovo have been found and identified.

Through a post on Facebook, Kurti stated that they were identified after “26 springs of waiting and anguish.”

“After the massacre in Kralan, Serbian state forces kidnapped and buried them in mass graves in an attempt to make them disappear, along with the evidence of their crimes. On April 2, 1999, they, along with hundreds of Albanian men and boys, were forcibly gathered by Serbian military and police forces in a field in Kralan, surrounded by tanks. There, they were held under continuous torture, without water and food, for two days. On April 4, 86 men and boys were taken away, including 11 minors. Since that day, none of them have ever been seen alive again,” Kurti wrote in his Facebook post, adding that after being exhumed from Bishtazhin, Serbia once again took the bodies.

Kurti confirmed that the bodies of Adem Gashi, Sahit Gashi, Bekim Hasani, Sheremet Ismajli, Mentor Myrtaj, Osman Fejza, Shkelzen Hajdaraj, Bekim Gashi, Sabedin Kryeziu, Mentor Kryeziu, and Vehbi Halilaj have been found and identified.

Authorities have not disclosed when the bodies were found or how long the identification process took.

According to the latest data from the Red Cross, as of January this year, there were still 1,612 missing persons from the 1998/99 war in Kosovo.

The chairman of the Kosovo Government Commission on Missing Persons, Andin Hoti, sent a letter to the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Kaja Kallas, in February, calling for concrete steps from her and the European bloc to pressure Serbia into cooperating and opening its state archives, including military, police, and intelligence records, to reveal the locations of those who went missing during the war.