Meja massacre

The Meja massacre was the mass execution of at least 377 Kosovo Albanian civilians of whom 36 were under 18 years old. It was committed by Serbian police and Yugoslav Army forces in the Reka Operation which began after the killing of six Serbian policemen by the Kosovo Liberation Army . The executions occurred on 27 April 1999 in the village of Meja near the town of Gjakova, during the Kosovo War. The victims were pulled from refugee convoys at a checkpoint in Meja and their families were ordered to proceed to Albania. Men and boys were separated and then executed by the road. It is one of the largest massacres in the Kosovo War. Many of the bodies of the victims were found in the Batajnica mass graves. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has convicted several Serbian army and police general for their involvement.
Meja is a small Catholic village in Kosovo, located a few kilometers northwest of the town of Gjakova. On 21 April, a week before the massacre, the Kosovo Liberation Army ambushed a Serb police vehicle near the centre of Meja, killing five policemen and one officer. One villager from Meja told Human Rights Watch researchers: "The five policemen were killed in one car, a brown Opel Ascona. They came to us a few minutes before they were killed, asking,“where is the KLA?” They left and then we heard the bazooka." One of the officers killed was police commander Milutin Prašević, the leader of a unit that, according to witness testimony, carried out the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in the area. The attack on Prašević is listed as a probable motive for the mass shootings that followed.

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