A Serbian court has for the first time ordered the state to pay compensation to families of Kosovo war crime victims, killed by a special police unit in 1990s war.
"The court in its verdict ordered the Republic of Serbia to pay 25.9 million dinars (210,000 euros, $240,000) to 24 family members of 14 victims," the Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC), a Belgrade-based non-governmental organisation that represents he families, said Friday.
While hailing the verdict, the HLC nevertheless said it would appeal as it believes "the court should decide to bring the amount of compensation in line with the standards of the European Court of Human Rights."
The state's attorneys told AFP they too would appeal against the verdict.
Five Serb police officers, all members of a special unit called the "Scorpions," were jailed to up to 20 years for killing 14 ethnic Albanian civilians, including women and children, and injuring five others in the northern Kosovo town of Podujevo on March 28, 1999.
The Podujevo massacre occurred during an 11-week NATO bombing campaign aimed at stopping Serb forces' crackdown against Kosovo's independence-minded ethnic Albanian population.
Following the 1998-1999 war in Kosovo, that claimed 13,000 lives, mostly ethnic Albanians, the breakaway Serbia's southern province of Kosovo was put under UN administration. It declared independence from Serbia in 2008.
Before the Kosovo conflict, Serbian Interior Ministry's unit the Scorpions took part in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia in the early 1990s.
Four other members of the unit were jailed to up to 20 years for having participated in the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica in 1995, the worst atrocity in Europe since the World War II, qualified by the international justice as genocide.