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The lawyer for Milos Pantelic, accused of killings, persecution and other wartime crimes in Visegrad area in 1992, said that the defence’s witnesses were contradictory and unreliable.
“The prosecution failed to prove any count beyond reasonable doubt, bearing in mind that every piece of prosecution evidence was challenged with numerous pieces of defence evidence,” Pantelic’s lawyer Nenad Rubez told the Sarajevo court on Tuesday, calling for his client to be acquitted of all charges against him.
Pantelic is charged, together with fellow Bosnian Serb fighters Predrag Milisavljevic and Ljubomir Tasic, with having participated in the murders and persecution of Bosniak civilians from the Visegrad area.
He is accused of having participated in the persecution of Bosniaks who were taken from Visegrad on June 14, 1992, and with being in a group of soldiers who escorted 49 of them to the Paklenik pit in the Sokolac municipality the next day, where all but one were killed.
But Rubez said that the prosecution “absolutely failed to prove the defendant’s involvement”.
“It is undisputed that the evacuation of the non-Serbs from Visegrad was organised by the Red Cross, and Pantelic, who was an ordinary soldier, had no contacts with that organisation or the local authorities. He could not have any knowledge about forced resettlement. Pantelic was securing civilians in the convoy as an ordinary soldier, which is a legitimate job,” Rubez said.
He added that the one survivor of the massacre, Ferid Spahic, and a protected witness codenamed M-7, who both testified about the events near the Paklenik pit, gave “contradicting statements, which cancel each other out”.
“Witness Spahic did not connect Pantelic to the killings near the pit with one single word. The only witness who mentioned Pantelic is M-7, who is a completely unreliable witness and who participated the crime himself. In his first statement from 1992, witness Spahic said that M-7 participated in the crime, but he later changed his statement,” Rubez said.
He said that prosecution also failed to prove Pantelic’s involvement in arrests and the burning of houses in the village of Kabernik.
“The only witness who spoke about the arrests and the taking of people from Kabernik was witness M-2, who said that he saw Pantelic near the house, but that he did nothing – which is not a crime,” he explained.
He said that the testimony of a man who said he saw Pantelic burning his house was unreliable.
“This witness said during the investigation that he was watching how his house was set on fire from 500 metres away with binoculars, and during the trial he said that he saw it with his own eyes from 150 metres away, and then reduced it to 70 to 80 metres,” Rubez said.
He also insisted that prosecution witnesses’ statements about the beating of civilians in villages in the Visegrad area were “unreliable and unclear”.
The defence for defendant Tasic will present its closing statement on September 16.
