Prosecution Points to Discrepancies in Witness Testimony

The Prosecution of Bosnia and Herzegovina told the court that Ljubo Josipovic said different things about the murder of prisoners in the Zvornik area in July 1995 in the statement given to investigators than in his testimony at the trial.
 
Josipovic, who worked for the police in Zvornik during the war, said that he probably found out from the media that captives from Srebrenica were brought to a new school building in Petkovci, near Zvornik, and killed.
 
“I most probably heard about it in the media. There were so many stories that I do not know what the source of each piece of information was. (…) The police did not speak about it,” the witness explained. 
 
Prosecutor Predrag Tomic reminded the witness that in the statement he gave to investigators from the State Investigation and Protection Agency in 2011, he said that he learned about the murders from other people “as soon as the situation calmed down”. The statement was recorded.

At the hearing the witness refuted this statement, explaining that he simply said that others told him that Lazar Maksimovic, known as Banjo, participated in the murders.
 
Josipovic was testifying at the trial of Ostoja Stanisic and Marko Milosevic, who are charged with having participated in crimes committed at a dam in Petkovci, where about 1,000 captives from Srebrenica were shot.
 
The indictment alleges that Stanisic was the commander of the Sixth Battalion of the Zvornik Brigade with the Republika Srpska Army, VRS, which was based in Petkovci village, while Milosevic was his deputy.
 
The Prosecutor then read a portion of the statement, in which the witness said that some of the captives survived the shooting at the dam. At the hearing the witness said that he learned about this from TV while watching a testimony by one of the survivors.
 
Josipovic said he knew indictee Milosevic, but he did not know what his function was, adding that he knew Stanisic by sight.
 
The trial is due to continue on May 15.