Fighters Accused of Revenge Beatings

The prosecution witness, protected under the codename ‘A-6’, told the Sarajevo court on Wednesday that Dragicevic, alias ‘Krompir’ (‘Potato’), Vlahovic, alias ‘Batko’ (‘Uncle’), and another fighter she called Captain Dragan Petkovic came to the building where she lived with her parents and brothers in the summer of 1992.

“Dragan pointed at our apartment and went to another, while Batko and Krompir, who were armed, came inside and took my brother away,” said A-6, alleging that they were seeking retribution because her brother had refused to go to fight on the frontline in Vukovar.

She said that when her father asked Vlahovic and Dragicevic where they were taking her brother, the defendant Dragicevic knocked him to the floor.

The witness said she had seen Dragicevic and Vlahovic every day when she was forced to work as part of a labour unit cleaning apartments at the Digitron Buje residential building in the Grbavica neighbourhood of Sarajevo.

She said the fighters took her brother to the Digitron Buje building, and when he came back, he was “black from beating” and only able to crawl.

“I thought he had no eyes, he was so swollen, and I fainted,” she said.

Dragicevic, as a former Bosnian Serb Army serviceman, is charged with war crimes against the non-Serb population in the Sarajevo settlements of Grbavica, Vraca and Kovacici, and accused of rape and sexual abuse, torture, robbery and beatings.

Vlahovic was jailed for 45 years last week in a separate trial in which he was found guilty of 60 different crimes including around 35 murders and 11 rapes while he was serving with Bosnian Serb paramilitary units during wartime.

According to the witness, the three fighters, with two other people she named as Gordana and Tanja Miskovic, took her brother to Digitron Buje again seven days later.

An hour later, her parents were taken there too and beaten, and mother told her that they attempted to rape her.

The trial will resume on April 10.