Mladic Defence: Mass Grave Victims Misidentified
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Mladics lawyer Branko Lukic told the Hague Tribunal on Thursday that the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP) wrongly identified victims and tried to cover this up by paying bribes.
Lukic cited a statement allegedly given by Jasmin Odobasic, the former deputy chief of the former Bosnian Federation Commission for Missing Persons.
Ian Hanson, the ICMP deputy director for forensics replied that he did not know Odobasic but admitted that he knew of cases of misidentification which the ICMP had tried to fix.
Hanson began his testimony to the UN-backed court on Wednesday, when he said that 371 sets of mortal remains were exhumed from a mass grave at the Tomasica mine, near Prijedor, in 2013. He said that some had been transferred from there to the grave in Jakarina Kosa.
Prosecutors allege that Bosnian Serb forces killed the Bosniaks whose bodies were buried at the Tomasica mine in the spring of 1992 during an ethnic cleansing campaign in the area.
Citing Odobasics statement, Lukic said that during an exhumation in Jakarina Kosa in 2001, two bodies were identified as one person. Hanson said that he did not know of Odobasics statements and that the exhumation in 2001 was before his time at the ICMP.
Asked if the ICMP had wrongly identified victims and given bodies to the wrong families, forcing re-exhumations, Hanson said that wrong identifications were not unusual.
But he said he knew nothing of Odobasics claims that the ICMP gave bribes to a police officer in Bihac to hide wrong identifications.
Mladic is charged with genocide in Srebrenica and several other municipalities in 1992 Prijedor among them.
He is also on trial for genocide in 1995 in Srebrenica, terrorising the population of Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
The UN-backed court decided last year to allow the prosecution, which had already finished presenting its evidence against Mladic, to call a series of new witnesses to testify about Tomasica.
The trial continues on Monday.
