Female Bosnian Soldier Appeals Conviction for Killing Boy

Veseli said she hoped the appeals chamber would “correct the fatal mistake” of the first-instance verdict handed down in May this year.

“I hope you understand the torment that I am going through. I hope you will work in the name of justice,” she said.

Her defence lawyer Vasvija Vidovic argued that the first-instance verdict was “incomprehensible and unlawful both in procedural and substantive legal terms”.

Vidovic argued that the verdict convicting Veseli was based on “statements given by captured and abused Muslims, who did not survive the torture”.

“The defendant was sentenced on the basis of hearsay evidence. The evidence pointing to a different conclusion was disregarded,” Vidovic said.

The prosecution also appealed against the verdict, arguing that Veseli’s ten-year jail sentence was not proportionate to the seriousness of the crime.

Veseli was found guilty in May of killing a 12-year-old boy, Slobodan Stojanovic, on an undetermined date in the second half of July or first half of August 1992 in the village of Bajrici-Novo Selo in the Zvornik municipality.

The verdict found that Veseli “committed the murder of the boy with direct premeditation by shooting him in the head with a firearm from an immediate distance”.

The prosecution alleged at the trial that she killed the Serb boy out of revenge for the murder of her father, but Veseli denied this.

Veseli’s co-defendant in the trial, Sakib Halilovic, the former commander of the Sabotage Squad of the Bosnian Army’s Liplje-Kamenica Joint Units, was acquitted in May of failing to undertake measures to punish the perpetrator of the boy’s murder.

The state prosecution also appealed on Monday against this part of the verdict.

State prosecutor Miroslav Janjic argued that Halilovic should be held responsible for the murder of the boy by Veseli.

“Sakib Halilovic had de facto and de jure responsibility over the unit he commanded. Elfeta Veseli was a member of that unit,” Janjic said.

He argued that the first-instance court wrongly concluded that the criminal code of the former Yugoslavia, under which Halilovic was indicted, did not define command responsibility.

He said that there was an identical legal situation in another case, but the court in that case took a different stance on the issue of command responsibility.

But Halilovic’s defence lawyer, Lejla Covic, said that she thought there were no grounds for appeal over a violation of the criminal code.

“The only argument the prosecution has is inconsistent practice. Inconsistent court practices are not intended to be used as grounds for appeal,” Covic said.

“Command responsibility cannot be implied, but it has to be proved. The case does not contain a single piece of evidence that [Halilovic] knew of the child’s death,” she added.

The appeals chamber will hand down its judgment at a later stage.