Bosnian Serb Ex-Soldier’s Wartime Rape Conviction Upheld
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Sasa Curcic. Photo: Bosnian state court
The Bosnian state court on Friday rejected appeals against the verdict convicting Sasa Curcic and upheld the judgment finding him guilty of a crime against humanity for raping a Bosniak woman during the war in July 1992.
Ther verdict established verdict that on an undetermined date between July 3 and 18, 1992, Curcic and another member of the same Bosnian Serb Army unit, Dragan Zelenovic, took three women from the secondary school in Foca, where they were being detained, to a house in the village of Gornje Polje, where the defendant forced one of them to have sex with him.
The defence had appealed for the verdict to be quashed and a retrial held, claiming that “the injured party got the events and people mixed up”.
The prosecution had appealed for a more severe punishment, arguing that the five-year sentence was below the statutory minimum for a crime against humanity.
Both appeals were rejected, and the judgment cannot be appealed.
Zelenovic was sentenced to 15 years in prison by the Hague Tribunal for the rape and abuse of women and girls in Foca in 1992 – crimes which the UN court said were “part of a pattern of sexual abuse” of Bosniak women by Serb troops in the Foca area.
He was released in 2015 after serving two-thirds of his sentence.
