Mladic Witness: Bosnian Secret Service ‘Killed UN Soldier’

Subpoenaed witness Edin Garaplija, who was the head of Bosnian state security service’s anti-terrorist team, told Mladic’s trial in The Hague on Tuesday that the leader of its Seve (‘Lark’) paramilitary unit, Nedzad Herenda, admitted to him in 1996 that he and his men killed the UN peacekeeper and committed other crimes.
According to Garaplija, Herenda confessed that he shot the French soldier from the Bosnian Executive Council building in May 1995, while he was setting up a barricade on the street in front of Holiday Inn hotel in Sarajevo in order to protect people from Bosnian Serb attacks. “Herenda said that he fired so the UN could blame the Serbs,” the witness told the UN-backed court. He alleged that Herenda was paid 2,000 Deutschmarks for the crime.
Garaplija said that in May 1993, the Seve unit also killed the so-called ‘Sarajevo Romeo and Juliet’ – 25-year-old couple Admira Ismic, a Bosniak, and her boyfriend Bosko Brkic, a Serb, as they tried to cross the Vrbanja bridge in the city centre to the Serb-occupied district of Grbavica. “Herenda told us that he shot at that couple with a colleague, Dragan, from the Seve unit,” said Garaplija.
The witness said that “the Serb side was blamed [for the couple’s murder], as well as for the majority of sniper operations”.
Mladic, the former commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, is charged with terrorising the population of Sarajevo citizens during the city’s siege from 1992-95 with a campaign of shelling and sniping.Garaplija called Seve a terrorist group and blamed it for the killing of imprisoned Serb soldiers and civilians in Sarajevo’s Great Park, the assassination of senior Bosnian Army officer Sefer Halilovic and the killing of Serb civilians in Grbavica.
He also said that the Bosnian authorities arrested him in 1996 and charged him with trying to abduct Herenda, as well as attempted murder and abuse, right after he documented the Seve unit’s alleged crimes.
According to the witness, he was subjected to a “show trial” during which , show “certain structures tried to cover up” the Seve unit’s crimes, but he was ultimately acquitted.
He said that Herenda later disappeared and that his whereabouts are unknown. Mladic is also on trial for alleged genocide in Srebrenica, the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats across the country, which allegedly reached the scale of genocide in several municipalities, and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
The trial continues.