Sixteen staff members of state-run Radio and Television of Serbia (RTS) were killed on April 23, 1999 in an airstrike by NATO on RTS’ Belgrade headquarters. The attack destroyed RTS’s main newsroom and studios, knocking it off the air for several hours. The attack drew wide international condemnation, despite NATO officials and western leaders’ arguments that RTS was broadcasting propaganda, making it part of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s war machine and therefore a legitimate military target. In 2002, Dragoljub Milanović, the general manager of RTS at the time of the airstrike, was given a 10-year prison sentence for not having ordered the employees to evacuate, despite knowing that the building could be targeted. As of 2016, the Serbian Commission for the Investigation of Murders of Journalists was conducting an investigation into the airstrike itself, but NATO refused to cooperate.
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