Massacre Victims Remembered in Tuzla, Bosnia
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The families of the victims and various domestic and international delegations on Wednesday laid wreaths and flowers in the Bosnian town’s downtown area, Kapija, in memory of those who were killed there on May 25, 1995 by a mortar shell fired by the Bosnian Serb Army.
One of those attending the ceremony was Esma Slijepcevic, whose son Asim was killed just two days after celebrating his 20th birthday.
“Before going to Kapija, he asked for a watch and his ID card. Unfortunately, that is all I got back from him [after he was killed],” Slijepcevic told BIRN.
“I made him two pies, one with meat and one with cheese that night. He ate one and said he would eat the other when he got back. He never came back,” she said.
The only person convicted of responsibility for the attack was Novak Djukic, former commander of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Ozren Tactical Group, who found guilty of having ordered an artillery squad to shell Tuzla on May 25, 1995.
Djukic was released from prison in February 2014 after the Constitutional Court quashed the verdict under which he was sentenced to 25 years in prison on a legal technicality.
In June 2014, the state court reduced his sentence against Djukic to 20 years.
However he did not turn up to serve the sentence because according to his lawyer, he was undergoing medical treatment in Serbia.
An arrest warrant was issued in October 2014, because he failed to respond to the summons to serve his prison term.
Djukic is scheduled to appear before judges in Belgrade on June 1, after Bosnia asked Serbia to take over the case.
“The Bosnian court asked the Serbian [judicial] bodies to accept the verdict and send Djukic to a prison in Serbia in order to serve his prison term. During the procedure, the Serbian court can try to determine whether the trial held in the country requesting the acceptance of the verdict was fair or not,” Djukic’s lawyer Milorad Konstantinovic told BIRN recently.
Konstantinovic said that Djukic considered the verdict unfair so the defence has requested the complete case file to be sent from Sarajevo so that the Serbian court can review it.
