Families of the victims killed in the 1998 attack at the “Panda” café in Peja are again calling on prosecutors in Serbia to question Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić regarding statements he previously made about the case.
Ljubomir Ristić, the father of one of the victims of the December 14, 1998 attack, told the Serbian news agency Beta that families have repeatedly asked Serbia’s Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime to summon Vučić for questioning about what he knows about the incident.
In the attack at the “Panda” café, six Serbian youths were killed when masked gunmen opened fire on guests, many of them high school students.
According to Ristić, the families have sought meetings with Vučić several times after he publicly stated in the past that he knows what happened on the night of the attack. However, he said the president has never met with them, and prosecutors have not yet questioned him, despite the families’ requests.
Their legal representative, lawyer Ivan Ninić, submitted a formal evidence proposal to prosecutors on August 10, 2023, requesting that Vučić be interviewed due to earlier public statements in which he suggested that the crime was not committed by Albanians and that he was “almost certain” about what had happened.
Ninić also criticized the investigation’s pace, noting that nearly 40 witnesses have already been questioned, while the president—who claimed to have knowledge of the events—has not been called to testify.
The investigation into the killings officially began in 2016 in Belgrade. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, 39 witnesses have been questioned so far, but no indictment has been filed. Authorities confirmed in September 2025 that the investigation remains open, although no new witnesses have been questioned in the past two years.
Responding to questions about why Vučić has not yet been questioned, the Prosecutor’s Office stated that decisions about additional witnesses—including the Serbian president—will be made based on the objective assessment of the evidence and the appropriate timing for investigative actions.
The case remains one of the most controversial and unresolved incidents from the late 1990s in Kosovo. Shortly after the attack, Serbian authorities detained around 150 local Albanians, but they were later released due to lack of evidence.
Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti has previously described the attack as a terrorist act carried out by Serbia, accusing the Serbian state of continuing to conceal the truth about the killing of the six youths more than two decades later.
Human rights activist Natasha Kandić, founder of the Humanitarian Law Center, has also spoken publicly about the case, recalling testimonies and events surrounding the arrests and investigations that followed the attack in 1998.
Nearly 28 years after the shooting, families of the victims say they are still seeking answers about who carried out the attack and who ordered it, urging prosecutors to take further investigative steps while they are still alive.
