Appeals judges at the special Kosovo tribunal in The Hague on Thursday confirmed the war crimes conviction of a former Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) guerrilla commander who ran a prison during the 1998-99 independence conflict with Serbia but reduced his sentence from 26 to 22 years in prison, according to  RFE/RL.

In December 2022, Salih Mustafa was found guilty of murder, arbitrary detention, and torture at the facility where prisoners, mostly fellow Kosovo Albanians who were political opponents of the UCK, were beaten and tortured on a daily basis.

Judges found that Mustafa, who is now 51, personally took part in beatings and the torture of at least two prisoners and allowed his subordinates to mistreat another so badly that he later died.

On Thursday, in a first ruling by appeals judges on a war crimes verdict by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, as the tribunal is formally known, Mustafa’s conviction was confirmed, but his sentence was reduced by four years.

Mustafa denied the charges during the first trial and his lawyers accused prosecution witnesses of fabricating their stories. He has been detained in The Hague since 2020.

The decision to reduce the sentence was announced by the president of the Specialist Chambers’ appeals body, Michele Picard, in The Hague. Mustafa was also present in court.

The Kosovo Specialist Chambers, a Kosovar court seated in the Netherlands and staffed by international judges and lawyers, was set up in 2015 to handle cases under Kosovar law against former UCK guerrillas.

The court is separate from the United Nations tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which was also located in The Hague, where it tried and convicted Serbian officials for war crimes committed in the Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovar conflicts.

More than 13,000 people are believed to have died during the 1998-99 uprising in Kosovo when it was still part of Serbia under then-President Slobodan Milosevic.

The fighting ended after a 78-day NATO air campaign against then-Yugoslavia, and Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, although Belgrade does not recognize it as independent.