Convicted Sarajevo Policeman Arrested Over Srebrenica Killings

Saric was arrested on Thursday on suspicion that he was in charge of police units which were operating around Srebrenica in July 1995 and were involved in the capture and murder of Bosniak men and boys from the enclave.

His arrest came a day after he was sentenced to 14 years in jail for sending several dozen detained civilians to prison camps and others to their deaths in Sarajevo in 1992.

In the new charges, Saric is accused, as the commander of the Bosnian Serb interior ministry’s special police brigade, of knowingly aiding the joint criminal enterprise that was responsible for the killings of some 7,000 Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica.

He is accused of acting together with other army and police units, all the while knowing the main perpetrators’ deadly intent.

The prosecution alleged that Saric issued an order to policemen to watch over the Bratunac-Konjevic Polje road and capture several thousand Bosniak men and boys who tried to leave the UN-protected ‘safe zone’ of Srebrenica through the woods. The escapees were shot at when they fled.

The men were ordered to surrender, but even after they complied, they were not given medical treatment, even though some were seriously wounded. Instead, they were stripped of personal belongings, and members of the special police brigade’s Jahorina squad executed 15 to 20 of them at a house in the village of Sandici.

After that, members of the special police brigade’s Sekovici squad took several hundred prisoners to agricultural warehouses in the village of Kravica, where around 1,000 more of them were executed.

After the executions, members of the Jahorina squad tricked the survivors into coming out of the warehouses by promising them they would be treated; after around a hundred survivors came out, they were also killed.

Policemen then resumed bringing in and executing captured Bosniaks from Srebrenica.