Former Kosovo President Thaçi sentenced to 25 years for war crimes

Former Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi has been sentenced to 25 years in prison after being convicted of war crimes committed during the 1998-1999 Kosovo conflict, Euronews reported.

The Kosovo Specialist Chambers established under Kosovo law and staffed by international judges in The Hague found Thaçi guilty of murder, torture, cruel treatment and illegal detention during and shortly after Kosovo’s war for independence against Serbia.

The 58-year-old Kosovo politician, who served as prime minister and later president, was tried alongside three other senior former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) — Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi. The proceedings began in 2023 after prosecutors indicted the four men and transferred them to The Hague in 2020.

Prosecutors alleged that KLA members purposely targeted people they viewed as opponents or collaborators. At the same time, Thaçi’s defense argued that the KLA lacked a centralized command structure and that senior leaders could not be responsible for crimes committed by individual fighters.

The verdict is particularly sensitive in Kosovo, where many ethnic Albanians regard Thaçi and other former KLA leaders as key figures in the country’s struggle for independence, which became one of the final stages of Yugoslavia’s breakup in the 1990s. A series of wars across the Balkans during that period was marked by widespread violence, ethnic displacement and atrocities.

Last year, Italian authorities opened an investigation into claims that Italian citizens may have participated in so-called «sniper safaris» during the siege of Sarajevo, allegedly paying to shoot at civilians from positions overlooking the Bosnian capital.