Sabotage Team

During the cross-examination, Subotic stuck to her allegations that the market place could not have possibly been hit by mine-thrower grenades fired by the Republika Srpska Army, VRS, as alleged by the Prosecution.
 
The indictment alleges that Karadzic, the then President of Republika Srpska and supreme Commander of its Army, is charged with terrorising civilians in Sarajevo.
 
According to the charges, a grenade fired by VRS on February 5, 1994 killed 66 and wounded more than 140 citizens at Markale open market. The indictment further alleges that another VRS mine-thrower projectile caused the death of 43 and wounding of 75 citizens in front of Markale on August 28, 1995.
 
Commenting on Subotic’s allegation that a mine, which exploded at Markale in February 1994, was planted on the ground and activated from distance by “a highly-organised sabotage team”, Prosecutor Feargal Gaynor asked the witness whether this meant that the explosive must have been planted under an angle that would imply that the grenade came from VRS-held positions.
 
“Yes, the person, who prepared the incident, was well prepared…He did almost everything in a correct manner, but he made a few omissions,” the expert witness said.
 
After having been presented with the fact that neither a clockwork nor remote control device was found at the explosion location, Subotic said that one could not find “each small thing” at a crime scene.
 
When asked by the Prosecutor whether she was claiming that human bodies were planted at the market following the explosion and that citizens transported the bodies to a hospital and that the entire thing was finished “in between 15 and 20 minutes” in front of TV cameras, Subotic responded: “That is true”.
 
Also, she claimed that video recordings made immediately after the explosion showed “a series of illogical things”, like “moving of bodies” and arrival of “a military truck onto which a corpse had already been loaded”.
 
The witness accepted prosecutor’s suggestion that her allegations meant that “the sabotage team” had a number of corpses in civilian clothes at its disposal on the eve of the explosion.
 
Confirming that a certain number of civilians got killed by the explosion itself, Subotic said that the number of “much smaller” than the one mentioned in the indictment.
 
Subotic said that, one of the proofs that the event was staged, was an artificial leg that could be seen on video recordings, although the son of Camil Begic, who got killed in the explosion, previously said that the artificial leg belonged to his father.  
 
However, Karadzic’s ballistic expert claimed that those were two different prostheses.
 
When asked why, in addition to all the horrible scenes, “the sophisticated sabotage team” would wish to plant a prosthesis at Markale, the witness said: “I too wonder why”, suggesting that it served to create “an even more distressful image”.
 
The Prosecutor then asked her whether she expected the Tribunal to believe that a full scale conspiracy was executed in order to accuse the VRS for the crime at Markale. Subotic pointed out that, on the basis of material traces, “the projectile could not have come and exploded at that particular place without previously hitting a market stall roof”.
 
Also, Subotic stuck to a similar conclusion about the second explosion at Markale in August 1995, claiming that the grenade would have been registered by a special UNRPOFOR radar had it come from VRS-held positions and that somebody must have heard the firing sound had it been fired from a close distance by the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, adding that, traces found at the crime scene indicated that this was the case.
 
The witness suggested that the mine-thrower grenade could be thrown from a nearby building. She stuck to her allegations even after being told by Prosecutor Gaynor that it would mean that the person threw the projectile, which weighed around 11 kilograms, from a point 11 meters above the ground level to a distance of five meters and managed to hide himself in a bit more than a second after the explosion.
 
On May 22 Subotic is due to be additionally examined by Karadzic, whom the Prosecution charges with genocide in Srebrenica, persecution of Muslims and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina and taking UNPROFOR members hostage.