Feeling at Home in Detention Camp

Lozancic said that three unknown soldiers intercepted him in the street in Kakanj in 1993, beat him up, loaded him into a car and drove him to the old Mine Headquarters in that town. His minor daughter was with him at that moment. The soldiers pushed her, so she fell down onto the asphalt road.

“When they brought me, I told this to the indictee. He gave me a car and a driver, so I could go look for my daughter. I found her at my son’s, who lived in the vicinity of that place. I then went back. I was not taken out. Nobody mistreated or beat me. When they returned home later on, people said that the indictee beat them in the corridors and toilets, but I did not personally see that,” Lozancic said.

He said that “everything was dignified” during his detention and that it felt as if “he was home, except that he did not sleep at home.”

According to the charges, Sehagic, former Manager of a detention facility in the old Brown Coal Mine Headquarters in Kakanj, participated in the torture of Croat detainees.
 
The Zenica Cantonal Prosecution alleges that Sehagic failed to undertake the necessary and reasonable measures in order to prevent torture and report the torture perpetrators to his superiors, so they would punish them.  

The Prosecution presented Lozancic’s statements given to police and a State Prosecution investigator, in which he allegedly said that he was beaten up in the prison and that he saw the indictee beating and mistreating other detainees.

Lozancic said that his cousins, who mentioned the indictee and some other people, were present when he gave those statements, but he told the truth both then and now. He said that he would “repeat that before a thousand courts.”  

The Defence of Sehagic underlined that the same person took both of those statements, claiming that “the statements were mixed” and that “the investigator formulated the concept of happenings on that occasion.”

The trial is due to continue on September 16 this year.