Bosniak Officers War Crimes Sentence Annulled
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The Bosnian state court said on Tuesday that it had annulled the conviction of Alic, who was serving ten years in prison for wartime crimes in the Bosanska Krajina area in August 1995.
Alic, the former assistant commander of the Bosnian Army Fifth Corps Hamza Battalion, was convicted in January 2011 of having participated in the abuse of four captured members of the Serbian Krajina Army and failing to prevent their murder by an Arab irregular soldier.
His conviction was cancelled because the stricter Bosnian criminal code was wrongly used at his trial, instead of the more lenient criminal code of the former Yugoslavia, which was in force at the time when the crimes were committed. He now faces a new trial for the same offences.
So far more than 15 Bosnian war crimes convicts have been freed for the same reason, after a European Court of Human Rights ruling said they had been unjustly treated.
All of them have been or will be tried again and resentenced under the former Yugoslav criminal code.
