In this pair of award winning films, John Sweeney investigates a rumoured massacre of Albanians in Little Krusha, Kosova. ‘Witness to Murder’, shot in March 1999, investigated the stories told by refugees from this small village in the former Yugoslavia. Their shocking reports told of 100 men and boys being rounded up, herded into a barn, shot en masse, and then set alight, while many were still alive.
‘Prime Suspects’ is John Sweeney’s quest to find the perpetrators of this atrocity. He discovered that the murdered Albanians had for many generations lived side by side with the Serbs who were to butcher them in early 1999. Several members of one Serb family by the name of Nicolic are incriminated in a list of soldiers who were scheduled to carry out the executions.
Memet, an Albanian resident of Little Krushe, describes how he narrowly escaped the blazing barn by crawling out from under the bodies of his fellow villagers. Dmitri, the flamboyant patriarch of the Nicoloic family, was the godfather of one of Memet’s sons. Another survivor, who lost 14 members of his family in this carnage, explains that he had worked alongside Dmitri in a wine factory all his life.
The footage from the films has been sent to the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague as evidence in the trail against Slobodan Milosevic.
Directed & Produced by Jerry Gregg
Executive Producers: David Henshaw & Lesley Bonner