At the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague, during the presentation of the closing statement, Kadri Veseli\u2019s lawyer, Rodney Dixon, said that the Special Prosecutor\u2019s Office has no evidence of a \u201cjoint criminal enterprise\u201d and no grounds for its allegations against his client.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He called it absurd that the Prosecution relied as evidence on an interview Veseli gave in 2011, which, according to him, was distorted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe SPO has no evidence to support the \u2018joint criminal enterprise\u2019 they claim against my client. And in paragraph four of the case file, they include a surprising statement, citing what my client said in an interview on 9 February 2011. It was used as evidence that the General Staff acted collectively. I remind the court that they quoted something my client said in an interview many, many years after the war. The interview in the media was not under oath; he did not say there were no separate responsibilities, but that we did what we could \u2014 we were engaged in leadership, logistics, intelligence, counterintelligence, because those were the circumstances. The SPO then takes parts of this interview, but if they had listened to the entire interview, they would have understood that Veseli was talking about the early phases of the conflict. He continues and says that in May 1998, after discussions with Agim \u00c7eku, we started establishing the KLA structures and made them more professional. It is absurd. You need to be careful when giving weight to media interviews from 2009, which took place after the war. Veseli was becoming politically known and was answering general questions recorded or taken by journalists. There is no evidence; this is a conspiracy theory. The SPO is increasingly collapsing and reaching its end when it tries to show these as proof that Veseli contributed to a \u2018joint criminal enterprise,\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/em>he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dixon also rejected the Prosecution\u2019s claim that the Kosovo Intelligence Service (SHIK) was operational from April 1999.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey also mention a documentary covering Veseli\u2019s visit to The Hague in 2019 for the Specialist Chambers interview, but the collaborators are not mentioned at all. I say, since it is a public appearance showing that he came to The Hague, but to claim that this proves Veseli ran the entire apparatus to identify collaborators during the war is absurd. The SPO has tried to tell us that SHIK was operational from April 1999 and that Veseli was its head. They also claim that because of UNMIK, the provisional government was not allowed to do anything. Everything they say is based on Veseli\u2019s interviews, which do not show what specifically happened in April, May, June, July, and August 1999. The SPO has brought no evidence to prove that SHIK was operational during that time,\u201d\u00a0<\/em>he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague, during the presentation of the closing statement, Kadri Veseli\u2019s lawyer, Rodney Dixon, said that the Special Prosecutor\u2019s Office has no evidence of a \u201cjoint criminal enterprise\u201d and no grounds for its allegations against his client. He called it absurd that the Prosecution relied as evidence on an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":80221,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[296],"tags":[6694,431,7501,1170],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80220"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80220"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80223,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80220\/revisions\/80223"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kosovapress.com\/eng\/admin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}