Saw His Mother Being Taken Away

Testifying at the trial of indictees, who are charged with crimes in the Zavidovici area, the witness said that his family was the only Bosniak family whose members left in Kucice village, Zavidovici municipality, after the other residents had been deported.

“I was at my neighbour Sekula’s, when I heard my mother yelling: ‘Let him go. He did not do anything’. I ran to a corn field near the house and saw my mother standing in front of the house and three of them and my father on the other side of the house. Ranko was shouting, cursing my father his Muslim mother. He hit him with a pistol handle on his head. He fell down,” the witness recalled.

He said that Ranko Rakic then turned towards his mother and cursed her, while Bijeli told his father to run away to the corn field.

“I think that he saved his life by doing it,” said Husanovic, who was twelve at the time.  

As he said, he then met his father. The two of them saw the house burning and the three soldiers taking his mother, sister and her little child behind the house.  

Husanovic said that they approached the house and his father tried to extinguish the fire, but, when they heard a gunshot, they wanted to see what happened to his mother and sister.  

“A few minutes later we saw the three of them walking down a slope towards a hollow to which they took them. Neighbour Dragomir Cvjetkovic stopped me, telling me that they could kill us too. We went down when we were sure that they were gone. We found my mother’s body. She was lying on her stomach. There was blood on the right side of her body. My sister and her child were not there,” the witness said.
 
He mentioned at his sister came, carrying her child in her arms, at around 10 p.m. and that she looked scared, but she was deaf-and-dumb, so she could not tell them anything.  

“No shooting on frontlines could be heard on that day. No soldiers were present at that place. They took her to the hollow, so I am completely sure that they killed her,” Husanovic said.

Following a three-hour cross-examination the Chamber requested the witness to sketch the area and specify the distance between individual localities.

Trial Chamber Chairman Enes Malicbegovic said that it was necessary to determine, without doubt, whether everything could be heard and seen from that location and exclude the possibility that death could happen under different circumstances.  

The trial is due to continue on September 25.