14 Bosniaks Charged with Crimes Against Humanity
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Since it started working in 2003, the Bosnian prosecution has never before filed charges against Bosniaks for alleged crimes against humanity. The maximum penalty is 40 years in prison.
According to Bosnian prosecution, the men were commanders and members of the Bosnian Army, the local Territorial Defence force, the Croatian Defence Council, police and paramilitary groups who took part in a widespread and systematic attack on the civilian Serb population of the Konjic area.
“Many civilians were illegally detained and taken to camps in Konjic, where their torture continued. The crimes committed in 1992 and 1993 resulted in the persecution of almost the entire Bosnian Serb population in this area, and only a handful of them returned after the war,” the prosecution said in a statement.
In a separate case, the prosecution also raised an indictment against four former members of Bosnian Serb Army’s Vlasenica Brigade for assisting the Srebrenica genocide.
Mile Kosoric, Borislav Stojisic, Momcilo Tesic and Rajko Drakulic are charged with the killings of 21 Bosniak men and the rape and sexual abuse of women from Srebrenica in the summer of 1995.
The prosecution said that the defendants knew that buses carrying civilians from Srebrenica in July 1995 would pass through the village of Luke, where they stopped them, robbed the civilians and forcibly took out the men and young women.
The indictment alleges that the women were then raped and the 21 men were taken to Mrsici and killed.
The prosecution raised a third indictment on Thursday against former Serb paramilitary Branko Koprivica for crimes against Bosniaks in Gacko in 1992.
Koprivica is charged, as a former member of the White Eagles paramilitary unit and then as a Bosnian Serb Army serviceman, with killing two Bosniak civilians in Gacko in June and July 1992.
The indictments have been sent to the state court for confirmation.
