Witness Quits Serbian Srebrenica Trial, Citing ‘Threats’
This post is also available in: Bosnian
Belgrade Higher Court on Tuesday heard a police report from a meeting with a protected witness codenamed 301, who said he has decided to stop testifying at the landmark trial, claiming that stress from the threats he has received has caused his health to deteriorate.
Presiding judge Mirjana Ilic read the report in which the witness claimed to have received threats on his mobile phone from unknown persons.
The protected witness also alleged that an unnamed lawyer from Belgrade told him he does not have to testify at the trial of eight former members of a Bosnian Serb special police unit for the massacre of Bosniaks from Srebrenica in July 1995.
“In the end [the protected witness] said that he does not to want be summoned [to testify] anymore,” Ilic read from the police report.
The hearing was then postponed because one of the defendants, Dragomir Parovic, is still in hospital after allegedly slashing his wrists.
The president of the Association of Witnesses and Victims of Genocide, Murat Tahirovic, said that there are only two more protected witnesses in the Kravica case after witness 301 dropped out.
“We’ve known for a long time that he was being pressurised,” Tahirovic told BIRN.
The killings in the warehouse in Kravica were among several massacres by Bosnian Serb forces after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995 that left at least some 7,000 Bosniak men and boys dead.
Eight former members of a police special brigade from Bosnia’s Serb-led entity Republika Srpska are indicted for committing a war crime against civilians in Kravica on July 14, 1995.
Nedeljko Milidragovic, Aleksa Golijanin, Milivoje Batinica, Aleksandar Dacevic, Bora Miletic, Jovan Petrovic, Dragomir Parovic and Vidosav Vasic are accused of organising and participating in the shooting of more than 100 civilians in the warehouse.
The Serbian prosecution charged them in 2015 and the trial opened in February 2017, but proceedings have been plagued by delays.
So far more than 1,300 Bosniak civilians who were massacred in the warehouse in Kravica have been identified, after their bodies were found in several mass graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
