Covered with Bruises

Hajrija Besic told the Cantonal Court in Sarajevo that her husband Suad was in Celje on a business trip and that his father invited him to come back home.
 
“He left. He never came back again,” the witness said.
 
She said that her father-in-law told her, later on, that a few Serbs took them away.
 
“They dumped my father-in-law Bajro at the Jewish Cemetery. They came from the Command to tell me to go and get Bajro. Me and my brothers went to pick him up. Bajro’s body was blue, green. His clothes were torn. He was crying, crying. We began applying compresses to his bruises… He did not speak until the following day only. He said: ‘They killed my Suad’,” Besic said, adding that it took more than a year for her father-in-law to recover.

The witness said that her father-in-law did not tell her who beat him or who killed Suad.

“Bajro gave some statements at the Command. He did not want to tell me where he was beaten up. I know that he was beaten up in the garages near the Jewish Cemetery,” Besic said.
 
She said that her husband’s remains were found at the Jewish Cemetery about ten years later.  

The witness said that she did not know the indictees.
      
Bogdanovic and Sladoje are charged with having come to Besic’s house on June 13, 1992, taken Bajro and Suad Besic to a garage, where they beat him, and then to the Jewish Cemetery, where they used them as human shields. Suad was killed on that occasion.

Witness Radoslav Klaric said that Bajro and Suad Besic were members of a working squad and that they used to dig trenches.

After having been presented with a statement given on March 11, 2013, the witness confirmed that a wounded man told him at Kasindo Hospital that his neighbours Suad and Bajro had been taken to the division line near the Jewish Cemetery.  

Klaric confirmed that Bajro Besic sent him a letter, asking him to inform him if he knew anything about his son, but he was not able to do it.  

The trial is due to continue on May 13.