Witness Listened to Her Father’s Screams

Ljilja Ilic, who was almost eight in 1992, said she and her parents were taken to the police station in Stupari.

“My mother and I were put in one room, the father in another one, with just a wall between us. We sat on a bench and cried. We heard my father scream. I did not see them beat him, I just heard his screams,” recalled the witness, adding that she thought it lasted for hours.

She added that her father later told them that he held his hand in a power socket and was continually hit by electricity, that he ate a piece of newspaper, and was beaten with metal rods.

“The next day we were taken to a building in which we spent the next year. My mother helped my father climb up to the apartment, because he could not walk. She put wet towels on his legs. They were blue from bruises,” said Ilic.

She said she was an only child in the building and that they let her go to the woman named Senada, whose daughter she was playing with, and who was giving her a quarter loaf of bread to take to her father.

Ilic said that after a while her mother was taken to questioning and she did not return. The witness first said that a man named Safet came to take her to a police station, but later clarified that the guard told her father that Safet wants her to come down.

With crimes committed in Kladanje the prosecution charged Safet Mujcinovic, Selman Busnov, Nusret Muhic, Zijad Hamzic, Ramiz Halilovic, Nedzad Hodzic, Hariz Habibovic, Osman Gogic and Kahro Vejzovic, former members of the Territorial Defence and military and civilians police.

The witness said that only after her exchange did she learn that her mother was still alive, because one time a man told her father that she was killed, her throat was slit in a river.

Asked by the defence, she explained that her mother took some “envelope for an exchange” to Zvornik and did not come back, and that the soldiers sent her because they thought she would come back for her little child.

Ilic added that her father was sentenced to four months of prison and that she, while he served his sentence, was staying with her half-sister Novka in Tuzla.

Novka Karakasevic, the half-sister of the first witness, confirmed that her sister stayed with her while her father was serving his sentence in Tuzla. She said that her sister now has a certain “phobia” of Muslims.

“She came to see me in 2010. She was in a supermarket to buy me something and she told me later: ‘I suddenly felt goosebumps all over, my God, I wondered, are all those people Muslims?’” said Karakasevic.

Vasvija Vidovic, lawyer of defendant Ramiz Halilovic, presented the witness with the letter she claimed she wrote her father while he was in prison, and that she and her half-sister knew that her stepmother, and the mother of witness Ilic, was alive.
The witness did not confirm she wrote the letter, saying it looked like her handwriting, though.

Karakasevic said that Safet, whose surname was Mujcinovic, she thought, allowed her to visit her father in Stupari, and that he was very kind.

The trial will resume on April 25.