The US State Department has banned a former Serbian Gendarmerie commander from entering the United States due to involvement in the killing of Kosovo Albanian US citizens.
A State Department press release said the Goran Radosavljevic aka Guri and his immediate family have been banned from entering the US because of his alleged involvement in the murder of the three Bytyqi brothers at the end of the Kosovo war.
Brothers Mehmet, Agron and Ilya were arrested by the Serbian police, charged with crossing the border illegally and sentenced to a short prison term. They were taken out of jail and executed and their bodies were found in a mass grave.
The State Department said it was “publicly designating” Radosavljevic due to his involvement in gross violations of human rights under a regulation which makes him and his immediate family members “ineligible for entry into the United States”. “Radsosavljevic was credibly implicated in the 1999 murder of the Bytyqi brothers, three Albanian-American brothers killed in Serbia after the Kosovo War,” the press release added.
Radosavljevic told Radio Free Europe that he is not interested in the State Department decision. “I’m not going to react to that, I’m not interested in it nor does it affect me,” he said. He also denied any responsibility for the death of the Bytyqi brothers. “I gave statements to investigators and spoke about this a thousand times and it makes no sense to speak about it now,” he said.
Radosavljevic was a professional police officer and first commander of the Serbian Gendarmerie with the rank of police general. He commanded several operations by police special forces during the Kosovo war and later in southern Serbia. He is reported to have received the approval of the US in 2003 to lead a contingent of 1,000 Serbian troops who were to have been deployed with the international forces in Afghanistan. He he retired from the police in 2005. Radosavljevic joined the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) in 2010. He has not been seen in public over the past few years.
