Bosnian Serb Policeman Jailed for Srebrenica Genocide
This post is also available in: Bosnian
The appeals court in Sarajevo on Thursday convicted Ivanovic, a former member of the Sekovici unit of the Bosnian Serb special police, of keeping guard at an agricultural warehouse in the village of Kravica while 1,000 Bosniaks from Srebrenica were killed in July 1995.
“Ivanovic was keeping watch and preventing the prisoners from escaping through the window at the back of the warehouse, while other members of the [Sekovici] squad shot them,” said presiding judge Redzib Begic.
Begic said that the court also established that Ivanovic had also secured the Konjevic Polje-Bratunac road in the village of Sandici so that Bosniaks forcibly removed from Srebrenica could be brought through.
It ruled that he participated in the detention of Bosniak men who surrendered from nearby woods, and helped to escort the convoy of prisoners to Kravica, where they were killed.
“No other sentence except the maximum sentence one would match the level of Ivanovic’s responsibility,” Begic said.
In June 2013, Ivanovic was sentenced to 24 years in jail for the same crime.
But the sentence was overturned in May after the Bosnian constitutional court quashed the verdict because the more lenient criminal code of the former Yugoslavia should have been used at his trial, instead of criminal code of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had not come into force at the time that the crime was committed.
The three years he has already spent in prison will be counted towards his sentence.
