Bosnian Army Killed Children, Mladic Witness Says

On the second day of her testimony at Ratko Mladic’s trial in The Hague on Wednesday, defence ballistics expert Zorica Subotic claimed that Sarajevo police and the UN protection force UNPROFOR made a series of mistakes in reports which concluded that the Bosnian Serb forces, under Mladic’s command, fired the mortar bombs at civilians.

After reviewing the evidence and traces in the field, Subotic insisted that the missiles were fired by the Bosnian Army.

According to Subotic’s findings, the mortar bombs which killed six children in the Alipasino Polje district of Sarajevo in January 1994 were fired from the UPI Institute – which was held by the Bosnian Army – and not, as the indictment alleges, the Institute for the Blind, which was under the control of Mladic’s troops.

Subotic also said that the UNPROFOR and Sarajevo police reports contradicted each other about the projectile’s flight angle and the calibre of the weapon that fired it.

Mladic, the former commander of Bosnian Serb forces, is on trial for terrorising the population of Sarajevo through a series of shelling and sniping incidents. He is also charged with genocide in Srebrenica and other municipalities, the persecution of non-Serbs across the country and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

Subotic told the court that Sarajevo police officers also wrongly determined the source of the missile which killed 12 people in the Dobrinja district who were waiting for water in July 1993.

She said that the mortar bomb actually came from the opposite direction than the one listed in the indictment.

“The closest Bosnian Serb position… was eight to nine kilometres, and the maximum range of this weapon is much smaller,” she said.

She called the methods used by Sarajevo police investigators to determine the line of fire “unacceptable, incorrect and useless for any consideration”.

The trial resumes on Monday after a recess for Eid.