“I cried while filming the corpses”, cameraman recounts how he documented the massacre of Recak

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Kosovo commemorates today the 24th anniversary of the Reçak Massacre, where over 45 innocent Albanian civilians were killed.

The former head of the OSCE monitoring mission in Kosovo, Ambassador William Walker, described the Recak Massacre as a crime against humanity.

Sylejman Kllokoqi, the Associated Press cameraman during the Kosovo war, told Euronews Albania the horror he experienced when he had to document the bloody massacre of unarmed civilians to show the world.

Kllokoqi said that he was among the first to arrive in Reçak, where he quickly filmed footage of the mutilated corpses scattered around the village, and the footage was quickly distributed to all the news agencies in the world.

“Early in the morning around 6-7 I went very early to that area and asked some residents if the police had left, and I immediately went inside. I shot those images that went around the world very quickly. Later came Wolker who called it a crime against humanity. The Serbs came and took the bodies, took them to Prishtina and brought them back. I was one of the first to enter, on the way I remember a man without a head and the family was looking for his head in the yard. There were victims close to each other on the road, then I arrived at the valley where the other bodies were. I shot them very quickly and I went to Prishtina to take them to the world, and I returned to Reçak”, Kllokoqi confessed.

He remembered that the pain from what was seen was very great and tears fell while filming, but he did not turn off the camera at any moment, because as he said, the world should see what his eyes were seeing.

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