Balkan Diary: The 77 year old keeper of the Kitka hiking hut found massacred, UCK suspected

The day before yesterday at the Hiking Hut "Kitka" near Skopje the 77-year-old pensioner and writer Josif Ilkovski, the keeper of the Hiking Hut was murdered with a sharp and hard object. The tortured body of Ilkovski was found in a room lying down on the floor and massacred. The marks of the torturing were especially obvious on his head and chest.

In the other room where he usually stayed, Ilkovski, under the table the Police found a piece of a notebook paper on which it was written "We are waiting for you in the forest", signed with the initials of the Albanian terrorist group UCK. A team of Skopje Police and experts from the Department for Crime-technology and Criminal Acts, the investigating judge on duty and deputies of the primary public prosecutor visited the murder site. The deceased's body was submitted for autopsy to the Forensic Institute in Skopje with a document by the investigating judge.

According to the first information and due to the lack of official information, the police came to the Hiking Hut probably only few hours after the murder which was supposedly done some time between one and five o'clock in the morning but the investigation shows that on the body of Ilkovski there are many cuts on his chest.

Several members of the family of the murdered Ilkovski who had not answered his mobile phone for five days, after having had reported the case to the police on Saturday morning went looking for him, to see what's wrong with him. They searched the house but there was no trace of Ilkovsko. Since nobody had answered their calls, the relatives of Ilkovski called the police once again and told them that probably something was wrong.

Later on they searched the area around the house together with the police. The body of Josif Ilkovski was found downstairs in the corner of one of the rooms. The murder victim had a jacket, warm trousers and winter shoes, based on which the police are not excluding the possibility that Ilkovski was killed outside the house or in the woods and afterwards his body was dragged in the room and then thrown in the corner. In the room were the masacred body of Ilkovski was found ironically there was a piece of paper written by himself saying "Human-inhumane, the limit we have is between doing good and evil".