Rackovic Accused of Visegrad Abductions

Prosecution witness Remzija Liska told the Sarajevo court on Wednesday that in May or June 1992, she escaped from Visegrad to her parents’ house in the village of Kabernik, three kilometres away.

She recalled that one day she saw a truck that arrived carrying the defendant Rackovic and other soldiers.

“We then went to [our] neighbour Momcilo, because we thought he would protect us,” Liska recalled.

She added that Rackovic, whom she knew from before the war, was wearing a military uniform and was armed.

“We were watching from Momcilo’s house how Vito took six neighbours and we do not know anything about [what happened to] them,” she said.

Rackovic’s lawyer Petko Pavlovic pointed out that the witness did not say that the defendant took the villagers in her previous statement to the State Investigation and Protection Agency in July 2012.

Rackovic is charged, as a former member of the Bosnian Serb Army, with participating in attacks on Bosniak villages and taking part in illegal detentions, torture, forced disappearances and rapes in the Visegrad area from May to August in 1992.

According to the indictment, in July 1992, he took part in illegal arrests in the village of Kabernik. Some of those arrested were never found, while the bodies of others were later exhumed in the Zepa municipality.

Prosecution witness Munira Omanovic also testified on Wednesday, recalling how soldiers came to Kabernik and said through a megaphone: “Give up, you are trapped.”

She added that the defendant Rackovic forced her to go from house to house and help him search for people’s valuables.

“I was going in front of Vito [Rackovic] and when he would say ‘stop’, I would stop, and when he pushed me in the back, I would go. I had to open everything in the houses,” said Omanovic.

She said that afterwards, all the houses in the village, including hers, were set on fire.

The trial resumes on April 9.