Modified Air Bombs Launched by Bosnian Serb Army Were Precise, Says Mladic Expert

Ratko Mladic, the former commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, has been charged with terrorising the population of Sarajevo through a sustained shelling and sniping campaign. According to the indictment, modified air bombs fired by the Bosnian Serb Army were extremely inaccurate, destructive and used to hit civilian targets. Mladic has also been charged with genocide in Srebrenica and other municipalities, with the persecution of non-Serbs across the country and with taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
 
At today’s hearing, prosecutor Adam Weber said improvised modified air bombs fired by the Bosnian Serb Army sometimes fell as far as 250 meters away from their intended targets in Sarajevo. Subotic said this might have happened, and that those instances were the highest possible deviations.
 
Weber said in one such incident listed in the indictment, a modified air bomb landed 450 meters from its target. He asked Subotic if she thought this was acceptable. “No, that’s one of the 16 bombs we analyzed, which was beyond ballistic expectations,” she said.
 
However, Subotic said that a 250 meter deviation was “acceptable according to all professional rules and regulations.”
 
Weber also challenged a claim made by Subotic regarding a modified air bomb that was fired on an elementary school in Hrasnica on April 7, 1995. Subotic argued that the school had been hit because it housed the headquarters of a Bosnian Army brigade. After Weber suggested that UN military observers were deployed nearby and would have known about Bosnian Army positions in the area, Subotic said, “That is logical.”
 
She denied that a 250 kilogram bomb exploded in the area even after Weber showed her a confirmation of the attack by the commander of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Ilidza brigade, which fired the missile.
 
Subotic said “no one was hurt” in a modified air bomb attack in the same area on July 1, 1995, despite a Sarajevo police report which stated that two people were seriously injured and several more had light injuries.
Subotic said the fact that such a missile hit a residential building was the result of a ricochet effect from the Sarajevo television station building, which also housed a Bosnian Army headquarters.
 
Weber said it wasn’t for a missile carrying four rockets to ricochet off a building.
 
The trial continues on Thursday, October 8.