Son’s Dead Body in a Brook
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“Soldiers took my son Ibrahim and Ahmet towards the brook in Zlatnik. (…) A short time later I heard shooting coming from that direction,” Islam Kustura said in a statement he gave to the State Investigation and Protection Agency, SIPA, in late January 2009.
The witness said that, while he was running away, he saw the bodies of his son and Ahmet.
“My son was lying there, turned away from us. His head was in the brook. Ahmet had a cut on his stomach,” the statement read by Prosecutor Dzevad Muratbegovic says.
The witness said that they were hiding in the woods all the time and that he was captured, along with his wife and mother, on October 3, 1993, when he went back home in order to fetch some food.
“They took us to Uzamnica detention camp, where we stayed for three years. We were held in military hangars,” Kustura said.
In his statement the witness said that S-1 told him that Petar Kovacevic killed Mujo Gacko and that a protected witness buried him.
The Prosecution of Bosnia and Herzegovina, BiH, charges Petar Kovacevic, a former member of the Republika Srpska Army, VRS, with having participated in murders, rape and unlawful arrests of civilians in Visegrad in late May 1992. He is also charged with the murder of Mujo Gacko in Dobrun village.
In his statement, which was also read in the courtroom, Adil Dizdarevic said that he slept in the woods from the very beginning of the war and that he knew Petar Kovacevic and his family well.
Dizdarevic, who gave the statement to SIPA in May 2007, said witness S-1 told him about the murder of Mujo Gacko and that Kovacevic killed him.
“S-1 buried Mujo, who was exhumed after the war and buried in Gorazde,” Dizdarevic said.
The trial is due to continue on January 26.
