Former Kosovo President Hashim Thaçi was sentenced to 25 years in prison Wednesday after the Kosovo Specialist Chambers convicted him of four counts of war crimes committed during Kosovo’s 1998-99 war for independence from Serbia.
The court found Thaçi criminally responsible for murder, torture, cruel treatment and arbitrary detention. Three other former senior Kosovo Liberation Army commanders — Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi — were also convicted of war crimes, according to the Associated Press.
The four men had denied the charges. Thaçi resigned as Kosovo’s president in 2020 to face the proceedings in The Hague.
Prosecutors had sought prison terms of up to 45 years for Thaçi and the three other defendants. The court’s verdict followed a trial that examined alleged crimes committed by KLA forces during and after the 1998-99 conflict.
The Kosovo Specialist Chambers, an EU-backed court based in The Hague, was established to prosecute alleged crimes committed during the Kosovo conflict. The court had scheduled the judgment for Sept. 16.
The verdict is a major development in the long-running effort to prosecute alleged crimes committed during the conflict, which ended after NATO intervened in 1999.
