Local Justice – Doboj: Murders from Automatic Rifle

Pathologist Ljubomir Curkic explained that, on the basis of Odzak police reports dated May 31, 1992, it could be determined that Sreto Mlinarevic, Vlado Vidic and Zdravko Djuric were killed from an automatic rifle.
“They died a few minutes after having been wounded,” Curkic said. Jadranko Seljakovic, pre-war worker at the Dispensary in Odzak, told the Court that he saw the killed people, including his uncle Sreto Mlinarevic, on a couch in Rade Ljubicic’s house. “With the help from my neighbour Ivo Cubela, I took the bodies down from the couch, which we set on fire later on, to the floor,” the witness said. Witness Seljakovic said that Ilija Milosevic, his former neighbour from Jezero, who has since died, told him after the war that he was among the captured civilians, who were “tied by indictee Ribic”. The indictment alleges that Senahid Ribic, former “member of the 102nd Brigade of the Croatian Defence Council, HVO in Odzak, committed arrests of civilians, physically and mentally abused captured civilians, killed civilians, confiscated other people’s property and participated in setting houses on fire in the Odzak area in the period from May to July 1992. The witness said that Milosevic told him that, after having fled, he and other civilians watched his grandmother’s house burning, adding that he used to live in that house as a sub-tenant. Upon his return from Switzerland, the witness spoke to the indictee in the courtyard of a house in Proleterska Street in Odzak in 1998 or 1999. He said that he asked him why he had set his house on fire. “Senahid told me that it was done because they found a green military uniform underneath the couch. Our conversation then ended,” Seljakovic said.

A.G.