THE HAGUE, Feb 11 (Reuters) – Lawyers for Kosovo’s former president Hashim Thaci said on Wednesday that he was innocent and should be acquitted on all charges brought by war crimes prosecutors who say he masterminded a violent political power grab by the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army in the late 1990s.
Lawyer Luka Misetic told judges at the special Kosovo war crimes court in The Hague that the prosecutors’ allegations that Thaci and the three other commanders waged a violent campaign to get political control over all of Kosovo, were an unfounded attempt to rewrite the country’s history.
“There is ample reasonable doubt for you to enter a judgment of acquittal on all counts,” Misetic said.
Thaci’s defence team earlier argued that he had no real authority over the KLA and its military commanders during the uprising and its aftermath and had to defer to local zone commanders.
Thaci and three other former Kosovo Liberation Army commanders are charged with persecution, murder, torture and forced disappearances of people during and shortly after the 1998-99 uprising that eventually brought independence for the Albanian majority region from Serbia.
Thaci, 57, who served as prime minister, foreign minister and president of independent Kosovo between 2008 and 2020, and his co-accused deny all the charges.
On Monday, prosecutors sought a 45-year prison sentence for Thaci and his co-accused at the end of a nearly three-year trial. They say that in 1998 and 1999 more than 100 political opponents and perceived collaborators with Serbian security forces were killed and hundreds abused in and around 50 detention camps run by the KLA.
More than 13,000 people, the majority of them Kosovo Albanians, are believed to have died during the late 1990s insurgency, when Kosovo was still a province of Serbia under then-nationalist strongman President Slobodan Milosevic whose troops violently cracked down on ethnic Albanians.
(Reporting by Stephanie van den BergEditing by Tomasz Janowski)
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