Reading of Testimonies on Murder and Arrests

The prosecutor, Sanja Jukic, read the 1996 testimony of late Z.S. who related how on July 19, 1993, a dozen members of the Croatian Defence Council came to her house, among them Nidzo Maric and one Tokic.
 
“Nidzo asked for a rifle from my husband. He said the rifle was with his son Alija, and we did not know where he was (…) He took a hundred Deutschemarks from my husband’s coat,” Z.S. said in the testimony presented by the prosecution.
 
She said that her husband, who had difficulty walking and had to rely on two walking sticks, was killed by “Nidzo”.
 
“My husband fell and rolled over. There was a pool of blood under him. I did not see where he was hit (…) Nidzo told me I would be burying him tomorrow and to get inside the house now,” testified Z.S. 

The witness also said that she saw Nidzo kill Omer Selimovic with a rifle.

The prosecution also presented the statement from R.C, who was locked up in the secondary school centre in Prozor. He said that he saw the murder of Munib Grcic, but could not see who killed him, “because they shot from the door.”
 
R.C. also said that Nikola Maric drove away six persons on a small army truck, among them Avdo Alibegovic, Omer Purgic and Bajro Pilav, all of whom disappeared without a trace after that.
 
Nikola Maric, former member of the Croatian Defence Council, is charged with expulsion on 25 counts. He is charged with participating in murders, torture and other inhuman acts committed between November 1992 and October 1993.
 
The prosecution also presented the 2009 testimony of M.G. in which he said that he saw Nikola Maric in his village of Skrobucani in the municipality of Prozor, when he asked for weaponry with a group of soldiers.
 
He said he was arrested with a group of other villages in December 1993 and locked up in the Firefighter Home in Prozor, and that people were taken to interrogation upstairs, where screams could be heard.
 
M.G. said that Nikola Maric interrogated him and asked that he write a statement about who had weapons, and that he slapped him and held him while one Goran Pavkovic beat him up.
 
At this hearing, the testimony of one S.K. was read too, in which he said that he was expelled with other villages of Donji and Gornji Visnjani to the territory controlled by the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina and that Nikola Maric participated in the expulsion.
 
The witness A.S. in his testimony specified that Nikola Maric came to his village of Druzinovici “to drive them out”.
 
The defence of Nikola Maric said that if these witnesses had been alive, they would have asked them, among other things, about their acquaintance with  the defendant,  the description of the defendant in the incriminated time and concrete actions he undertook.
 
The trial will resume on October 23.