Silos Warden Made Death Threats to Prisoners
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Testifying for the Prosecution, Andric said that in June 1992 he was arrested and taken to the Silos. The camp’s warden, he said, was Becir Hujic.
“Beca walked the deck. When Ilija asked him how long this will be going on, he said: ‘I will kill you all’,” the witness recalled, adding that he personally heard Hujic say that.
The Prosecution charges Hujic, together with Mustafa Djelilovic, Fadil Covic, Mirsad Sabic, Nezir Kazic, Halid Covic, Serif Mesanovic, and Nermin Kalember with committing crimes against Serb and Croat prisoners in the Silos camp, the Krupa barracks and the May 9 school in Hadzici.
According to the indictment, Hujic was the warden, but also deputy warden of the Silos, and the same position were held by Halid Covic. Kalember was a guard at the Silos, and Sabic a chief of the police station in Pazaric, while others were members of civilian, military and police authorities.
Andric said he was once taken out of his cell to the corridor, where a man named Saban hit him.
“My cellmates had it worse. They were beaten more,” said the witness, adding that one prisoner told him that Kalember had beaten him up.
At the start of the hearing, the witness said that on arrival to the Silos he saw Hujic who was fair to him. Andric said that before his arrest he turned over the weapons he got in April 1992 from the Serb Democratic Party. The defence teams presented a criminal report and proposal for indicment which the military prosecution in Sarajevo filed during the war against the witness because of illegal possession of weapons.
Mahir Azem, the second witness at this hearing, said that in early 1993 he started working as a guard in Silos. He added that guards in this facility were fair to prisoners. “The prisoners did not complain that they were harassed by guards, and there was a lot of helping. I helped them,” he said, adding that the guards’ task was also to guard prisoners who were taken to do hard labour near the Silos.
He said that the warden of Silos was Becir Hujic. “You also had Covic and Sera. One was assistant, the other deputy,” he said and added that guards were not allowed to enter cells with prisoners without permission.
The trial will resume on October 31.
