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Podujevo 1999 – Beyond Reasonable DoubtThese witnesses, like other members of the Scorpions, stated that the shootingthey had heard was coming from firearms different from the automaticrifles they were issued with. This data does not tally, first of all, with thetrace evidence at the crime scene as the cartridge cases found at the crimescene correspond to cartridges used in the automatic rifles of the type themembers of the Scorpions unit had been issued with, and with the statementsgiven by witnesses, particularly the witnesses who were the membersof the SAJ Active Corps.Other statements of these witnesses - that they did not see who had shotthe civilians, that they were not, officially or unofficially, told why they hadbeen returned to Prolom Banja on the same day - the court found to be untrue.In their attempt to hide the fact of their personal participation in theevents of the day, there is the desire to cover up the fact of the participationof their co-fighters, members of the same unit, in the event. This, also, is thereason why these witnesses used to change their statements at the maintrial in comparison with their statement given in the investigation, which iswhy the court could not accept the statements of these witnesses as true.The presence in Podujevo on 28 March 1999 of the Scorpions unit that alreadyat that time had been given regular SAJ status, and whose memberwas the defendant, Saša Cvjetan, is beyond dispute.On the basis of the presented interlinked evidence, it has been incontestablydetermined that the defendant had first entered the house of SabitGjata where he ordered the civilians to leave the house, threatened themwith murder, levelled his automatic rifle at the plaintiff, Rexhep Kastrati, hithim with his rifle, and took a 1,000 German mark note which the plaintiffhad given him on his way out of the house with the members of his familyand members of other families.After all the people from these houses had gone out and gone down thestreet, the defendant returned to one of the houses from the same courtyard,searched it and discovered a pistol which he appropriated. At thesame time, members of the Scorpions unit, from the house of the Bogujevcifamily which was in the immediate vicinity of the house of Sabit Gjata,drove out a group of women and children and elderly men who were stayingin the house. Leaving the courtyard, they found themselves in the315