Bosnia Cuts Iraqi Fighters Jail Sentence
This post is also available in: Bosnian
The Bosnian state court appeals chamber on Tuesday partially accepted the defences plea and reduced Maktoufs prison term.
Volunteer fighter Maktouf was convicted of helping members of the El Mudjahid unit, a detachment of the Third Corps of the Bosnian Army made up of foreign mujahideen volunteers, with the illegal detention and kidnapping of five Bosnian Croat civilians in Travnik in October 1993.
He was retried after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that during the original trial – which lasted from 2004 and 2006 – the criminal code of Bosnia and Herzegovina was wrongly applied, instead of the more lenient code of the former Yugoslavia.
Maktouf had already served five years in jail. After he was released, he was stripped of his Bosnian citizenship and left the country and settled in Malaysia.
He was allowed to re-enter the country to attend the retrial.
The verdict cannot be appealed.
