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Witness Dragan Vujcic, a former engineer in the Bosnian Serb Army’s Prijedor Brigade, told Mladic’s trial at the Hague Tribunal on Wednesday that he never received an order to bury corpses at the quarry in Tomasica where the mass grave was later found.
According to Vujcic, the brigade’s construction equipment had “was never used for burying the bodies”.
He said that he had never been to Tomasica and that he heard about the mass grave for the first time “from the media when the bodies were exhumed”.
According to the International Commission on Missing Persons, 604 bodies were identified after the exhumation, which was completed last year, in the primary grave in Tomasica and a secondary grave in nearby Jakarina Kosa.
The Hague Tribunal prosecution is trying to prove that these were bodies of Bosniaks from nearby villages, killed by Bosnian Serb Army during an ethnic cleansing operation in the Prijedor area in 1992.
Mladic, the former commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, is charged with the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats which reached the scale of genocide in Prijedor. He is also on trial for terrorising the population of Sarajevo, genocide in Srebrenica and several other municipalities, and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
Answering the prosecutor’s questions, Vujcic confirmed that during the spring and summer of 1992, his unit used the equipment from the Ljubija quarry complex, which has sites at Tomasica and Jakarina Kosa, but only for “construction of a road towards Gradacac”.
“We were never in Tomasica… I didn’t know anything before the exhumation. I did not know about the camps either, since I was on the battlefield non-stop,” Vujcic said.
Asked if he could rule out the possibility that the brigade’s excavators and bulldozers were used for burying the bodies in Tomasica, the witness said: “I don’t know that, I am not familiar with that, because I was on the ground non-stop.”
The trial continues.
