Prijedor Witness Saw Dead Husband Outside Mosque

“I was 20 metres from the mosque and my vision started to blacken,” Ifeta Kahteran said.

“I saw them lying still. My husband’s feet were on fire, and [I saw] my cousin Emir Causevic’s entrails, while flaming segments of the roof were falling on them.”

On July 23, 1992, Kahteran was with her family and cousins in the village of Carakovo in Prijedor municipality when the Bosnian Serb army, VRS, arrived.

“A soldier came to the house and told my husband, Kemal, to go to the mosque to agree on something there and he told the same to Emir,” the witness said.

She added that the soldier who came was in uniform, in boots with a belt, and that it was “Banovic”, whom she recognised after his father.

The Prosecution of Bosnia and Herzegovina charges Dragomir Soldat, Zoran Babic and Velemir Djuric with war crimes in Carakovo.

Babic and Djuric are charged with having taken men from their homes in Carakovo on July 23, 1992, acting on orders from the third defendant, Soldat, and then shooting them dead outside the mosque.

The indictment says that some of the men who survived the shooting died when Djuric and Babic set the mosque on fire afterwards.

After they took her husband and cousin away, Kahteran went to the mosque because a neighbour had told her what had happened.

“My son, who was 10, was sick when he saw his dead father. He told me: ‘Mother, take me to the doctor, save me,’” recalled the witness, adding that they immediately returned home.

She could not even bury her husband because so many Serb soldiers were around the mosque.

“Only in 2001 did they find parts of my husband’s body, and all of his bones have still not been found to this day,” Kahteran said.

The trial resumes on April 26.