Maktouf sentenced to five years

Judges at Bosnia’s newly established specialist war crimes chamber have sentenced former Muslim fighter Abduladhim Maktouf to five years in prison for his role in the abduction of five Croat civilians during the war in Bosnia.

The sentence handed down on April 4 is the same as that given to Maktouf, a Bosnian of Iraqi origin, in July last year, before appeals judges declared a miscarriage of justice and called for a retrial.

The judges hearing the case this time around were convinced by evidence that Maktouf assisted members of the Bosnian army’s El Mujahed unit in kidnapping the five Croats in question in the Travnik region of Bosnia on October 18, 1993. Besides helping to plan the operation, he was also found to have driven one of two vehicles involved.

In the retrial, which began in February this year, just three witnesses gave evidence before the court – one for the prosecution and two for the defence. A prosecution witness who testified in the first instance proceedings, and who apparently took part in the kidnapping alongside Maktouf, refused to return to court after the judges declined to back earlier promises that he would be granted immunity from prosecution.

Defence lawyers used the fresh trial process to try to refute testimony given by this witness by calling a former member of the El Mujahed unit, Ramo Durmish, who claimed that it was in fact the prosecution witness himself who was behind the wheel of the vehicle which Maktouf was accused of driving. Durmish said Maktouf had never been in the vehicle.

But the judges were not convinced by Durmish’s testimony and concluded that Maktouf had played a particularly active role in the kidnapping of two of the five Croats, Kazimir Pobric and Ivo Fisic.

Judge Hilmo Vucinic said Maktouf waited in his own car outside the building where Pobric lived, while members of the El Mujahed unit brought the two men out by force and put them in the vehicle’s boot. They were then taken to a military site known as the Orasac camp, where members of the El Mujahed unit were based.

The judges said they were not convinced that Durmish had in fact been anywhere near the Orasac camp or that he had seen the events in question, as he claimed.

Maktouf’s defence lawyer, Adil Lozo, stated his intention to take the case to Bosnia’s Constitutional Court. He claimed the verdict was “biased” and based on “false facts and tampered evidence”.

Following the war in Bosnia, Maktouf owned a chain of stores which sold technical goods and Pakistani furniture. He also ran a company with business enterprises in Austria, Pakistan and Canada.

He was arrested by the Bosnian authorities in 2002 for tax fraud. The subsequent decision to rework the charge sheet against him to include allegations of war crimes after he had already been in custody for several months was criticised in legal circles.

Lozo has claimed that the main aim of the prosecutor involved in the case at the time, American lawyer Jonathan Schmidt, was to get his client to come to an agreement, confess his crimes and then appear as a witness in proceedings against “bigger game”.

Schmidt, who has since left Bosnia, was called to testify in the retrial via video link. This never occurred due to technical difficulties.

Besides being the first war crimes case to be tried before Bosnia’s newly-established specialist chamber, the proceedings against Maktouf have also shone some light on the role played by foreign Islamic mujahedin fighters in the 1992 to 1995 war. Even ten years on, this subject has never been properly explored.

The 21 months that Maktouf has already spent in prison will be deducted from his five-year sentence.

Mirna Mekic is a journalist with Justice Report. [email protected]