On 21 April, a week before the massacre, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) ambushed a Serb police vehicle near the centre of Meja, killing five policemen and one officer.
[11] One villager from Meja told Human Rights Watch researchers: "The five policemen were killed in one car, a brown Opel Ascona.
"[12] One of the officers killed was police commander Milutin Prašević,[12] the leader of a unit that, according to witness testimony, carried out the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in the area.
On the morning of 27 April, Yugoslav government forces attacked the village of Meja without warning, shelling and burning homes.
[8] At the same time, early in the morning of 27 April, special police, along with the Yugoslav Army, expelled Kosovo Albanians from the area between Gjakova and Junik, near the border with Albania.
Government forces surrounded the villages, gathered residents and drove them on the road through Gjakova, some ridding on tractor trailers, some on foot.
[12] A nineteen-year-old girl originally from Orize, whose father was kidnapped the next day in Meja, told Human Rights Watch researchers: An order to leave came at 5:00 a.m.
[12]Refugees who travelled through Meja that day confirmed that police officers seized men aged fourteen to sixty from their convoys.
One woman said that her husband was removed from his trailer and joined a group of Albanians who were standing beside the road, where they were made to shout, "Long live Serbia!
"[12] Another witness saw the car that pulled her forty-year-old father and kept it with a group of about 300 other men who had been separated from the convoy and were beaten in the canal beside the road.
One witness (38), a teacher who passed through Meja at 23:00, told Human Rights Watch researchers: I saw a big crowd of people separated from their families: old and young men.
[12]Another witness whom HRW researchers interviewed separately, told a similar story, adding that a group of men was kneeling with their hands behind their backs, surrounded by soldiers.
[12] Human Rights Watch researchers, who in the early morning of 28 April awaited refugees from Kosovo at the Morina border crossing, saw tractors with trailers carrying only women, children and the elderly.
Ray Wilkinson, a spokesman for UNHCR in Kukës, who met the refugees at the border, said that on 28 April about sixty tractors had entered Albania, and that six of the seven people said that some men were taken from their vehicles.
[12] Human Rights Watch researchers learned of the massacre in the early morning of 28 April, when refugees from Kosovo entered Albania through the Morina border crossing.
[12]On the afternoon of 27 April, when members of the police and the Yugoslav Army stopped the second convoy at the checkpoint near Meja, the witness saw about 200 bodies lying by the road.
Members of the police and the Yugoslav Army from this refugee convoy took seven men from Ramoc and ordered the rest of the column to move on.
[12] Human Rights Watch researchers visited Meja on 15 June after NATO forces entered Kosovo, and saw the remains of several men in a state of decay, burned documents, personal belongings of the victims and empty bullet shells.
The field had burned documents and personal items - cigarette case, keys, and family photos - which appear to have belonged to the dead.
[12] After the fall of Slobodan Milošević, it was revealed that the bodies of Albanian civilians killed in Meja and Suva Reka under the organisation of the Yugoslav Ministry of the Interior were transported by truck to a Serbian Special Anti-Terrorist Unit training centre in Batajnica, near Belgrade, and buried in mass graves.
[15] Witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch researchers have identified some Serb policemen who were in Meja on 27 April, but did not see any of these officers committing the crime.
[12] One witness identified another policeman called "Guta," a police commander in the village of Ponoshec, claimed to be in Meja when the crime was committed.
[12] One witness, whose father was taken away to be shot, gave the following description of the perpetrators: As we were walking through Meja we saw about 300 dead bodies piled up on top of each other in a pasture.
They had dark blue police uniforms with loose red stripes on the arm just below the shoulder, I believe on the right arm [12]Another witness described a similar manner the forces separated the men from Meja: The Serbs were wearing camouflage uniforms, black masks, black gloves, and carrying automatic weapons.
[12]According to the testimony of Yugoslav Army serviceman Nikë Peraj at the ICTY, the military report that he had seen indicated that "68 terrorists were killed in Meja and 74 in Korenica".
[16]During post-war investigations in Serbia, at least 287 bodies of people who had at the time disappeared from Meja and surrounding areas were discovered in mass graves in Batajnica, near Belgrade.
Another suspect, Marjan Abazi, an Albanian collaborator of the Serbian Police from Ramoc, was arrested in Montenegro and then committed suicide August 2014 while in prison in Peja.
[10] Testimonies at the Hague Tribunal have revealed to many other Serbian officers who were involved in the events which led to the Meja massacre, but have never been indicted.