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Zeljko Jukic, a former member of the Croatian Defence Council, was found guilty on Tuesday at the Bosnian appeals court of taking part in a widespread and systematic attack against Bosniak civilians, including the forced disappearance of five people, torture, looting and forced displacement between July and September 1993.
“The chamber sentenced Jukic to 15 years, finding that he committed the crimes without human compassion against victims from a sensitive category, such as women, children and the elderly, and even sometimes, against people he knew and lived near to,” said Milos Babic, the presiding judge of the appeals chamber.
Jukic was found guilty, along with two other Bosnian Croat fighters of taking three men from the High School Centre in Prozor to a rubbish dump in August 1993; one escaped but the other two disappeared without trace. He was also convicted of taking two other prisoners from the school who were never seen again.
He was additionally found guilty of taking Bosniak civilians, in cooperation with other Croatian Defence Council members, from Prozor to the Dretelj detention camp, where he hit them with sticks, and punched and kicked them, as well as of looting in the villages of Visnjani and Lapsunj.
He was convicted of torturing a man in July 1993 at the fire station in Prozor by putting a lit cigarette to his cheek and burning his beard, and of forcing imprisoned Bosiniak civilians to fight each other in August 1993 in the village of Ustire.
The court accepted as mitigating circumstances the fact that Jukic did not have any previous criminal record and that he was only young when he committed the crimes, and today has three young children, while the number of victims and the seriousness of the crime were taken into account as the aggravating factors.
Jukic was sentenced by first instance verdict in January last year to 13 years in prison for the same crimes, but this verdict was quashed and the retrial started in October last year. He has been in custody since 2011 and the time spent behind bars has been counted towards his sentence.
The conviction cannot be appealed.
