Custody Extension Requested for “Last ISIL Warriors”

Suspect Dunic was removed from the courtroom at the beginning of the hearing, because he did not want to stand up when judge Saban Maksumic asked him to introduce himself.

“Islam does not allow me to stand up. Why don’t you respect my rules,” Dunic said.

Attorney Senad Dupovac said his client was kept in detention at the detention unit in Busovaca and when Dunic requested a physical check-up, he was put in isolation. He said he had problems with reading glasses and could not read.

“The situation is such that he does not have an adequate treatment. In some way, this is a consequence of that,” Dupovac said, explaining Dunic’s behaviour in the courtroom.

Prosecutor Merisa Nurkic said that Dunic’s father and his wife’s parents, as well as women deported from Syria on December 19 last year, were examined during the investigation.

“In his statement Dunic said he kept watch on the border towards the Kurds and was a member of an organization which apprehended people who were not members of the Islamic State. He received training on holding and handling weapons. (…) The examined women explained that our citizens received trainings, they fought for ISIL and received money for that,” the prosecutor explained.

She said that the suspect had been medically examined the day before in order to determine the level of his radicalization, adding that the medical report was awaited.

Dupovac said that the grounded suspicion was based only on statements given by Dunic’s father, father-in-law and mother-in-law, adding there was not a single fighter who would confirm that the suspect fought in Syria.

“His wife is not in a camp. She is in prison. Even if he could go to Syria, he would not stay in a camp, but prison. I propose house arrest,” Dupovac said.

The Prosecution of Bosnia and Herzegovina previously announced that Dunic had left Austria and travelled to Syria with his wife in 2014 and was arrested in Baghouz, Syria, in February 2019.

As for Kasupovic, the Prosecution said there was evidence that he left Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 12, 2013 and went to Syria, where he joined ISIL, as well as that he was among the last warriors of that terrorist organization.

Prosecutor Dubravko Campara said that a certain number of witnesses had been examined and new details obtained concerning his stay with ISIL, but it was necessary to examine other people who spent some time in Syria. As he said, there were about 40 of them.

According to him, orders had been given to inspect videos on the Internet depicting people with arms and ISIL flags, and to perform an expert examination of the suspect.

“We must do that in order to know the level of radicalization, his mental condition. The man stayed in Syria for seven years. We must know the level of radicalization of this man, what we can expect from him, because we saw on the videos what ISIL members were doing and how they threatened and intimidated people,” Campara explained.

Speaking about the reasons for custody, prosecutor Campara said that this crime was punishable with imprisonment sentence, adding that while staying at liberty, the suspect could get in touch with the persons with whom he had communicated earlier and leave Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“The last ISIL warrior surrendered with the others. Those were the last ISIL warriors who surrendered to Kurdish forces,” Campara said.

Defense attorney Senad Bilic objected to the custody extension motion, claiming that the measure could be fully replaced with measures of prohibition, including house arrest.

“I am not denying his stay in Syria. Through special investigative actions, during conversations conducted by his mother and sister, it was mentioned that he was in a town near the Turkish border, that he did not fight there, but there is no sufficient evidence that he was with ISIL,” Bilic said.

The defense attorney said that, when travelling out of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2013, the suspect could not have known that the United Nations had declared ISIL a terrorist organization, the arrest warrant was issued against him only three years later and he had never received any invitations.

“He spent ten months in that Kurdish camp. It is indisputable that he did not hide,” he said.

According to previous allegations by the Prosecution, Kasupovic was one of the first Bosnian citizens who went to Syria, where he was wounded several times.

In December 2019 Dunic and Kasupovic were flown back to Bosnia and Herzegovina together with Emir Alisic, Milarem Berbic, Jasmin Keserovic, Hamza Labidi and Armen Dzelko, who too are suspected of fighting on foreign battlefronts. They were previously ordered into one-month custody.