Bosnia Jail Camp Guard ‘Threatened to Murder Detainee’

A witness at the trial of five Croatian Defence Forces fighters for war crimes at Bosnia’s Dretelj detention camp in 1992 said that one of the defendants threatened to cut his throat.

Prosecution witness Dragan Rudan told the Sarajevo court on Tuesday that in 1992 he was locked up at the Dretelj detention centre in southern Bosnia, where he was abused on a daily basis.

He said that once a guard, who he knew as Poskok (‘Viper’) but later heard was one of the defendants in the trial, Ivan Medic, threatened him with death.

“Ivan Medic ‘Poskok’ put a bayonet to my neck and wanted to slit my throat in the military infirmary. He told me I would not leave the camp alive,” he said.

Responding to questions from Medic’s defence however, the witness said that he could not describe his assailant or recognise him in court.

Medic is charged with committing crimes against several hundred Bosnian Serb civilians imprisoned in 1992 at the Dretelj camp, along with Ivan Zelenika, Srecko Herceg, Edib Buljubasic and Marina Grubisic-Fejzic.

According to the indictment, Zelenika was an officer with the Croatian Defence Forces, Herceg was a former commander of the Dretelj military prison, Buljubasic was former member of the Croatian Defence Forces and deputy commander of the Dretelj barracks, and Medic and Grubisic-Fejzic were former guards in Dretelj.

The indictment specifies that they all took part in torture and in forcing prisoners to perform hard labour, and several people died from the abuse.

Witness Rudan told the court that during his imprisonment, he was once taken to be executed.

“A gun went off above my head and I thought I was finished. I opened my eyes and saw I was alive. They laughed, told me to lie down and not to move,” described the witness.

He said that members of the Croatian Defence Forces acted like sadists.

“When the hangar [where prisoners were held] would close, a guard would call you to approach the bars and they would hit you there. And they forced us to beat each other. I had to do it too,” the witness said.

Some prisoners, he said, were forced to have oral sex with each other.

He said that a woman he called ‘Marina’ “was present when two prisoners were forced to have oral sex” and that Herceg had “some kind of supervisory position”.

However he could not identify either of them or remember how long he was held at Dretelj.

Court officials will visit the Dretelj site next week, and the trial will resume on October 22.