Keeping Watch with Indictee

Zoran Tasic said that he was a member of the Reconnaissance Unit with the Fourth Battalion of the Republika Srpska Army in 1992 and that he reconnoitered the terrain on Zaglavak Hill on several occasions.

He told the Court that members of the Reconnaissance Unit were sent to Zaglavak several times and that they would stay for five days and come back.

“I kept watch with Vito up there several times,” Tasic said, when asked by the Defence whether he used to see Vitomir Rackovic on Zaglavak.         

He pointed out that other soldiers used to stay on Zaglavak unlike members of the Reconnaissance Unit.  

“Vito was there, whenever I came,” Tasic said, adding that soldiers left Zaglavak on July 12, 1992 in order to defend their villages.  

Rackovic, former member of the Republika Srpska Army, VRS, is charged with having participated in attacks on Bosniak villages, detention, torture, forced disappearances of persons from the Visegrad area, as well as rape, in the period from May 1992 to the end of August 1992.

Second Defence witness Milorad Mirkovic also said that he was on Zaglavak with the indictee, adding that he had known him since elementary school.  

“As far as I know, nobody left the place during those 40 days. They promised that somebody would come to replace us, but it did not happen,” Mirkovic said.

When asked whether he heard that the indictee went to Osojnica and Crni Vrh villages, the witness answered negatively, because he was on Zaglavak with him.  
 
Mirkovic said that it was known to him that the indictee was wounded after their withdrawal from Zaglavak on St. Peter’s Day in the second half of July 1992 and that the indictee did not appear for a month or two after that.  

The trial is due to continue on December 3.