Forced to Leave a Shelter in Kozarusa
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“Dragan Koncar came. I had known him from before, since his childhood. His father’s name was Filip. We were in the ruins of an old mill on the river. Five soldiers came with him. Dragan was dressed in grey uniform and armed with a rifle. ‘You are waiting here, while our soldiers are being killed. Come out, all of you, or else I will kill you’,” first State Prosecution witness Hamdija Cirkin said, recalling Koncar’s words.
Cirkin said that Koncar asked if they had weapons and whether more people were present. The witness then told him that none of them had weapons and showed him where the other people were.
“Dragan said: ‘Go down to the asphalt road. Wait for a bus’,” the witness said, adding that Koncar and the other soldiers stayed in Kozarusa.
The witness identified indictee Drago Koncar in the courtroom, saying that he was the person about whom he spoke in his testimony.
Drago Koncar, Mitar and Rade Vlasenko are charged with having killed eight civilians, who were hiding in the ruins of a house in Kozarac. The murder was committed in June 1992. The victims were rather young. The youngest of them was 17 years old.
Witness Cirkin said that detainees told him that eight people were killed in the vicinity of Tidza Cirkin’s house.
In his statement given to the Prosecution on April 15 this year, which the Prosecution read, he said that S-1 told the witness that Mitar Vlasenko and Dragan Koncar participated in the murder of seven people.
“Nobody has ever told me who had killed those people. S-1 did not tell me about the murders,” Cirkin said.
Calling on the mentioned statement, the Defence said that the witness did not say that “Dragan told them: ‘Come out, all of you, or else I will kill you’.”
“I said that he would kill all of us. I think I did say that,” the witness said.
He mentioned that he saw Dragan in 2000, when he brought construction material for his neighbour’s house. As he mentioned, Dragan asked him: “Hamdija, is that the new house foundation?”
The witness said that his house and the neighbouring houses were set on fire during the war.
The trial is due to continue on December 24.
