Former Security Official Claims No Knowledge of Prijedor War Crimes at Mladic Trial

The indictment charges Mladic with the persecution of the non-Serb population throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina. Prijedor was one of the six municipalities where the persecution orchestrated by Mladic reached the scale of genocide.

Kijac responded to prosecutor Arthur Traldi’s questions during his cross-examination, which was interrupted in October due to the sudden death of another defense witness.

Traldi suggested that Kijac knew about the grave crimes that were committed against Bosniaks and Croats in Prijedor by Serb forces.

“We in the Security Service didn’t have such findings. We didn’t investigate war crimes either,” Kijac said.

Traldi asked Kijac whether he knew that Serb forces held Bosniak and Croat civilians in “catastrophic conditions” in the Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje detention camps in the summer of 1992. Kijac said he was the Chief of the National Security Service Center in Sarajevo at that time and “did not have information on the happenings in Prijedor.”

Traldi then presented a report from a meeting held in July 1992, which Kijac attended. The report of the meeting indicated that Bosniaks were being taken to detention camps. The same report indicated that there was no food in the camps and the conditions were not in line with international conventions.

“I don’t know if they were detention camps or concentration centers, I wasn’t there…We had no role in decision making. Detention camps were not within our responsibility,” Kijac said.

The prosecutor and judges asked Kijac once more whether he knew about the inhumane conditions in the detention camps.

“In general, yes, I knew there were concentration centers, but no other information reached me,” he said.

Mladic has also been charged with the genocide of approximately 7000 Srebrenica civilians, terrorizing the local population of Sarajevo and taking UNPROFOR members hostage.

The defense will continue presenting evidence tomorrow, November 12.