Witness Talks of Husband’s Disappearance

Sija Dzananovic said that at the start of the war she was in the village of Holijaci near Visegrad when the shooting started and that she fled from the village with women and children towards the woods.

“They were setting everything on fire in Holijaci… When we came back later, the village was burnt down. Houses of my brothers, father and cousins were gone. On that May 31 my husband disappeared and I have never seen him again,” she said.

The witness said that she was looking for her husband in the following days and that the man who was imprisoned with him told her that her husband would be released when he gave a statement, but that never happened.

“I found him only seven or eight years ago when he was exhumed in the territory of Visegrad,” said Dzananovic.

Asked by the defence whether she knew defendant Vitomir Rackovic, she said she did not know him nor heard of him.

Rackovic is charged, as member of the Army of Republika Srpska, with participating in the attacks on Bosniak villages, capture, torture, forced disappearances, as well as rape committed in the territory of Visegard between May and late August 1992.

Some of the illegally arrested persons, as defined in the indictment, were never found, and the bodies of certain civilians were exhumed in 2000 at the Slap location in Zepa.

Another witness, Suad Dolovac, said that at the start of the war he was taken and locked up in Uzamnica, together with his brother.

“There were several of us in Uzamnica and they were brining in new ones every day. Mustafa was brought in too, saying that a group of people, among them the here present Vito, took him to Ljeska,“ said the witness, adding that he was released from that facility, but some of the prisoners were never found.

The witness said that he knew the defendant. Asked by the defence why he did not say in an earlier deposition what Mustafa had told him, the witness said that no one had asked him about it.

The trial will resume on April 2.