Incident in Lez

On 31 August, the Ministry of Interal Affairs (MUP) surrounded Lez, a small village located in southeastern Kosovo.

On 1 September, around 8:00, the MUP began shelling Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) positions in the hills around the village. The villagers fled to the nearby village of Ljubičevo, while the KLA members remained in Lez.

At around 10:00, the Yugoslav police approached a KLA position at a place called Livadhet te Lavdicës. A grenade exploded in the trench at this position, killing four members of the KLA. Another six members of the KLA were killed at the same location in an exchange of fire with the police. In the afternoon, a group of policemen entered the village from the direction of the village of Kustendila, having previously clashed with a group of KLA in the forest above the village, during which three KLA fighters were killed. By the end of the operation, three more members of the KLA were killed.

Serbian-language media reported that three policemen were wounded during the incident. Miroslav Rakonjac was wounded by automatic weapons around 14:00. Miroljub Ristić was seriously wounded and Nenad Aleksić was lightly wounded by the action of militants using automatic weapons, hand grenade launchers and mortars at around 16:20.^[1][2]

After this, less intense conflicts continued in the surrounding Prizren villages. According to reports in Albanian-language media, a total of 27 members of the KLA were killed in the clashes around Prizren in the period 1-5 September 1998, including the incident in Lez.^[3]