Hague Urged to Confront Karadzic With Mass Grave
This post is also available in: Bosnian
The prosecution filed a motion on Wednesday asking to call five new witnesses and present freshly-discovered evidence about the mass grave at the Tomasica mine near Prijedor – the largest so far uncovered in Bosnia – after resting its case against Karadzic two years ago.
“The new evidence is relevant to the charges of a joint criminal enterprise through killings, extermination and persecution of the non-Serb population. The evidence demonstrates the planned, systematic and widespread nature of the killings in Prijedor,” said the motion.
The remains of hundreds of bodies of Bosniaks and Croats killed by Bosnian Serb forces during their ethnic cleansing campaign in 1992 have been found at the Tomasica grave, which was only discovered last summer after a tip-off from a former Bosnian Serb fighter.
If allowed, the Hague prosecution plans to call as witnesses Amor Masovic of the Bosnian Institute for Missing Persons Amor Masovic, Ian Hanson and Thomas Parsons of the International Commission on Missing Persons, and two forensic pathologists.
Karadzic is on trial for genocide in Srebrenica and seven other municipalities, one of which is Prijedor. He is also charged with the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats across Bosnia and Herzegovina, terrorising the people of Sarajevo through a shelling and sniping campaign and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
His trial started in 2009 and the prosecution finished presenting its evidence in 2012, while Karadzic called his final defence witnesses last month.
In a separate motion, the Hague prosecution also proposed calling 10 rebuttal witnesses and introducing four written statements into evidence.
“The prosecution plans to call ten witnesses who would deny defence claims about previously determined facts regarding five municipalities. During his evidence hearing relating to municipalities, Karadzic tried to prove that attacks of Bosnian Serb forces on civilians were actually conflicts between armed forces and that the killings either didn’t happen or were unplanned. The prosecution will prove the defence evidence is not credible,” said the motion.
