Ex-Soldier Recalls Night-Long Execution of Srebrenica Bosniaks
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Eric estimated that he saw between 500 and 1,000 dead Bosniaks outside the hangar, not including others who were inside.
“I did not count them, it seemed to me that was how many there were,” Eric told the court.
He said that he spent the previous night in a barn next to the hangar, and claimed that he heard captured Bosniaks shouting “Allahu akbar” and calls to “strangle the ‘Chetniks’ [derogatory term for Serbs] with bare hands” before the shooting started.
Eric said that he later heard a story that four Bosniak prisoners overpowered and killed a Bosnian Serb Army guard, after which the Serb forces started shooting the captives, but added that he did not see the incident personally.
The next day two other soldiers asked for his help to cover the bodies in front of the hangar, because they heard that UN peacekeepers were approaching the area, Eric said.
Two other witnesses told the court how they transported the bodies from Kravica to a mass grave in the nearby village of Glogova after the killings were over.
Truck driver Ostoja Stanojevic said that when he drove his truck to Glogova he saw the mass grave with some bodies already in it.
Another driver, Krsto Simic, said that he was sent to Kravica without being told what his task would be, and that members of the Civil Protection Corps loaded corpses onto his truck.
“I saw one grave dug in Glogova… it was 50 to 60 metres long, with a descending ramp at one end for vehicles to enter,” Simic said.
He said that in late September or early October he was told to return to Glogova to move the bodies again, this time to a mass grave in Zeleni Jadar.
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 1,300 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.
