In the latest search for Kosovo war victims, an investigation will begin on Thursday at a suspected mass grave near the southern town of Novi Pazar, Serbia’s missing persons commission told BIRN.

Veljko Odalovic, the head of Serbian Commission for Missing Persons told BIRN that preliminary excavations will take place on Thursday and Friday at the site near Novi Pazar.

“We will be checking the information we received from Pristina. They [Kosovo’s government commission on missing persons] have information that there might be a mass grave. We received a request from them and are now acting on it,” Odalovic said on Wednesday.

So far, mass graves containing the bodies of more than 1,000 Kosovo Albanians killed during the war have been found in four locations in Serbia – at a police training centre in the Belgrade suburb of Batajnica, in Lake Perucac, at a police centre in Petrovo Selo and at the Rudnica quarry near the southern town of Raska.

The most recent to be discovered was the mass grave in Rudnica last summer, when 54 bodies of Kosovo Albanians killed during the war were found.

Odalovic said that both countries’ commissions have already visited the site near Novi Pazar together several months ago in order to locate the potential grave. He said however that he could not give any further information about the bodies thought to be buried there, the year they were buried or their ethnicity.

“We will check everything, and if there is something [there], we will continue with the excavations,” he said.

Representatives of Serbia’s War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office and the EU’s rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, EULEX, will also be present at the excavations, together with representatives from both Serbia and Kosovo’s missing persons commissions.

In January, the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre published a report accusing current Serbian Army chief Ljubisa Dikovic, as a commander of the 37th Brigade of the Yugoslav Army during the Kosovo conflict, of being responsible for the removal of the bodies of Albanians killed in the Kosovo villages of Rezalle, Staro Cikitovo, Donji Zabelj and Gladno Selo in 1999 in an attempted cover-up. Forty-seven of the 54 bodies found in the Rudnica mass grave were from these villages.

Dikovic has denied the allegations.

So far no one has been prosecuted in Serbia for the operation to remove the bodies.

Only former Serbian assistant interior minister Vlastimir Djordjevic has been convicted by the Hague Tribunal of transporting the bodies from Kosovo to Serbia, among other crimes during the Kosovo war.