from Geopost.com
Mother of one of the young men killed in “Panda” warns of lawsuit: Vučić knows the truth, the Serbian state killed our children
Ljubica Trifović, the mother of Dragan Trifović, the 17-year-old killed in the attack on the “Panda” cafe in Peja on December 14, 1998, has accused the state of Serbia of hiding the truth about this case, stating that she is ready to sue the state, but that her priority remains the full disclosure of the crime.
In an interview with the Serbian portal Nova, Trifović said that the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, knows all the circumstances of the event, but remains silent.
“I will sue the state. But let them tell the truth. Vučić has stated that the public will be shocked when they learn the truth. It doesn’t matter who committed the murders, but who gave the order,” she said.
According to her, the victims’ families have been waiting for answers for years, while Serbian institutions have done nothing to solve the case.
“We know everything, literally everything, but the one in charge is silent. He said three times that he would invite us and he didn’t. I thought we would go to the Serbian Government and protest until they would listen to us, but that didn’t happen. I think everything is known, it’s just that everyone is silent,” said Trifović.
She rejected earlier claims that Albanians were the perpetrators of the attack, implying that the victims’ families have long believed that responsibility was concealed by Serbian authorities.
“The state of Serbia killed our children. Aleksandar Vučić is hiding the truth. At that time he was the Minister of Information. He knows,” Trifović declared.
The mother of one of the victims said she will not exhume her son from Peja.
“I didn’t exhume the boy, he remained in Peja. The others didn’t exhume him either. I won’t exhume him either. Land there, land here. He was only 17 and a half years old when he was killed,” she said.
Trifovic also recalled the statements of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic during his trial at the Hague Tribunal, when he spoke about a bomb explosion at the “Panda” cafe.
“Milosevic himself said in The Hague: ‘A bomb was dropped.’ What bomb? They were riddled with more than 50 bullets,” she said.
In the interview, Trifović also made statements about the events that followed in Kosovo, claiming that the “Panda” case had an impact on subsequent developments, including the events in Recak. She said that the main question remains who gave the order for the killing of the six young Serbs in Peja.
The “Panda” case remains one of the most controversial episodes of the war in Kosovo. On December 14, 1998, gunmen killed six young Serbs in a cafe in Peja.
Responsibility for the attack has never been established. Initially, Serbian authorities attributed the attack to Albanians, but years later, the president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, publicly declared that “the truth about the Panda case is not what was said before,” without explaining what he meant by this statement.
Even when asked by journalists in Brussels about this issue, Vučić did not give a concrete answer, while to date the Serbian authorities have not published any official conclusion on the authorship of the murder of the six young men in Peja.
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