Women Washed Away Blood After Srebrenica Killings
This post is also available in: Bosnian
Marko Spasojevic, a prosecution witness at the trial of former Bosnian Serb officers Ostoja Stanisic and Marko Milosevic, recalled the day in 1995 when people from Srebrenica were brought to his village of Petkovci near Zvornik in north-eastern Bosnia.
Spasojevic said he heard screams coming from a truck and pleas for water, which he said he brought and before returning to his yard.
He said that small groups of people started jumping out of the truck and running away, but the soldiers who were escorting the prisoners shot them down on the spot without any warning.
He said that more than seven men were killed, and local women washed away the blood. He said that the rest of the captured men were taken to the villages new school by the soldiers who brought them to Petkovci.
Shooting could be heard from the new school in the evening hours. It lasted well into the night, he recalled.
The prosecution alleges that Stanisic, former commander of the 6th Battalion of the Zvornik Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army, and Milosevic, its former deputy commander, knew about the planned execution of the prisoners and that under their command, they were escorted to the Petkovci dam, where around a thousand of them were murdered.
During the cross-examination, Milosevics lawyer Petko Pavlovic read out the transcript of the witnesss deposition in which the investigator told him he was lying and that he had evidence that Spasojevic participated in tying up the prisoners, although he added that the witness had denied this.
The other witness at the trial on Wednesday, Vukica Kostic, said that in July 1995 she was visiting her mother in Petkovci, who told her that horrible things had happened.
The prosecutor read her deposition from the investigation where it said that her mother told her that men had been killed, but the witness denied her mother having said anything like that, adding that she heard about the killings from the media. She said that the investigator insisted on her saying something she did not really know to be true.
The trial will resume on March 20.
