Custody of Vinko Kondic Terminated

By the custody termination decision, certain prohibiting measures were also pronounced against Kondic, including a ban on leaving his place of residence without the Court’s consent, a ban on travelling and confiscation of his personal identification and travel documents.

Kondic, the former Chief of the Public Safety Station in Kljuc, and Boko Lukic and Marko Adamovic are charged with crimes against humanity, as well as organising a group of people and abetting them to commit genocide and other crimes in the Kljuc area during the course of 1992.

At a status conference held on September 13, Kondic’s Defence requested that the Court release the indictee to liberty and separate his case from the case against the other two indictees due to his bad state of health. The indictee suffers from Parkinson’s disease. Hearings were often postponed because he was unable to appear in the courtroom.

“We consider that his state of health is such that he can no longer stay in custody, because he is absolutely not capable of taking care of himself. We think it is time to separate his case from the others for the sake of the two other indictees,” Predrag Radulovic, one of Vinko Kondic’s Defence attorneys, said at the status conference.

The Prosecution said it would not respond to the motion until it had examined the court experts who determined that Kondic’s state of health was “very bad”, but the Trial Chamber rendered a case separation decision on the same day.

Kondic was arrested in December 2007 and had been held in custody since his arrest. At the beginning of the trial in July 2008 the Court joined his case with the case against Lukic and Adamovic.