Second Instance Verdict for Kalinovik Crimes in Mid-November
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The Defence teams of Milan Peric, Spasoje Doder, Predrag Terzic and Aleksandar Cerovina asked in their closing statements that their clients be acquitted by saying that “nothing has objectively changed when in comparison to the first instance trial.”
On March 27, 2012, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina acquitted former policemen from the Kalinovik police station of charges that they aided the expulsion of Bosniaks by participating in the arrest of civilians and their taking to the Miladin Radojevic school and Gunpowder Storage camp, where most of the imprisoned were killed.
Radivoje Lazarevic, lawyer of defendant Cerovina, emphasised there was no correlation between bringing in of the civilians and their subsequent murder, and that it cannot be linked to the accused, who only “carried out orders to bring in the civilians”.
“I ask the Appeals Chamber, which is smarter than both the first instance chamber and me, to find a cause-and-effect link if there is any between these actions and the killing of these civilians,” said Lazarevic.
The Defence of accused Peric stuck to closing arguments presented before the first instance Chamber, while Refik Serdarevic, Doder’s Defence lawyer, said his client did not participate in any actions in the municipal building where civilians where brought, except being in a security detail.
The Defence of Terzic, the third defendant, pointed out the discriminatory basis of the charge, since at the time his client was 22, which means he was not mature enough to be assigned with discriminatory intent, and that the Prosecution, if they had any evidence, would have presented it by now.
According to the indictment, Peric, Doder, Terzic and Cerovina, with other policemen, surrounded the Bosniaks in front of the municipal building, and on Doder’s orders, who commanded over a group of policemen, forced them to board army trucks and then illegally locked them up in the Miladin Radojevic school.
Terzic and Cerovina are charged with arrest of Bosniaks from the village of Vihovici in late July 1992, after which they turned over the arrested to the Gunpowder Storage camp.
Several hours after these events, the Prosecution believes, the defendants carried out an attack on the Kalinovac villages of Jelasca and Vihovici and arrested all men who escaped, and locked them up inside the school without any legal basis.
