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While requesting the Court to release the indictees to liberty, the Defence attorneys said that the Prosecution did not have any pieces of evidence that prove that the indictees, former commanding officers with the Sixth Battalion of the Zvornik Brigade of the Republika Srpska Army, obstructed the investigation.
Prosecutor Dubravko Campara said that it was planned that 67 witnesses, including some protected ones, would testify for the Prosecution.
“The Prosecution had to protect ten witnesses during the investigation. The witnesses are afraid for their security. Should the indictees be released to liberty, the witnesses would be influenced,” the Prosecutor explained.
Campara said that more than one thousand Srebrenica residents were killed at Petkovci dam, near Zvornik in July 1995, but not all of the remains had been found. He said it was not in Stanisic’s and Milosevic’s interest that the remains be found.
Citing other reasons for custody measure, the Prosecution said that public order and peace would be disturbed if the indictees, who were arrested in the second half of June 2012, would be released to liberty.
Stanisic and Milosevic are charged with having deliberately helped the Army and civil police during the implementation of a plan “to permanently and forcibly remove the entire Bosniak civil population from the UN protected zone of Srebrenica” in the Petkovci and Djulici villages, near Zvornik in July 1995.
The Prosecution alleges that 40,000 Bosniak civilians from the Srebrenica enclave were resettled, while more than seven thousand men and boys were killed.
Defence attorney Milos Peric said that the Prosecution did not have evidence to support those allegations.
“There is no evidence that he obstructed the investigation and criminal proceedings. You cannot order somebody into custody unless you have arguments for that,” he said.
The Defence attorney said that the Prosecution’s allegations that the public order and peace would be disturbed by releasing the indictees to liberty, were weak and lacking concrete arguments.
Milosevic’s Defence attorney Petko Pavlovic agreed with Peric, adding that Prosecution witnesses did not say, in their statements, that the indictees had influenced them.
The Defence attorneys requested the Court to release the indictees to liberty and proposed that it ordered less strict prohibiting measures, which “would have the same effect as detention”.
The Court will render a decision concerning the custody extension motion at a later stage.
