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Belgrade Higher Court. Photo: BIRN.
Radmila Stevanovic, who worked as medical worker with Bosnian Serb forces in the Visegrad area in 1993, told Belgrade Higher Court on Wednesday that Dragana Djekic, one of the defendants accused of abducting 20 people from a train in Strpci and killing them, was with her on the day that the crime was committed.
Stevanovic told the court that she and Djekic, together with some ten other people, were involved in an operation in a nearby wood in the snow when Bosnian Serb fighters stopped the train and seized the passengers on February 27, 1993.
“We went to that operation together, the alleged action, we just went through that snow… She was with me the whole day, in the evening we went to Okolista [the village where they were staying], changed clothes, had dinner, sat down for a while and went to sleep,” Stevanovic said.
“The next day I heard that something had happened,” she added. She claimed that she did not know who participated in the Strpci crime.
In a parallel trial in Sarajevo for the same crime, the Bosnian state court last week found seven former soldiers from the Bosnian Serb Army’s Second Podrinje Brigade guilty of involvement in the abductions and murders of non-Serbs from the train in Strpci.
Obrad and Novak Poluga, Petko Indjic, Radojica Ristic, Dragan Sekaric, Oliver Krsmanovic and Miodrag Mitrasinovic were sentenced to 13 years in prison each for participating in the crime under the first-instance verdict, which can be appealed.
The verdict found that the defendants and other armed fighters drove to the station in Strpci, where some of them entered the train and, after checked their identity documents, took 20 passengers out.
The captives included a ticket collector, Muslims and Croats, as well as one unknown person of Arabic origin.
They then drove them by truck to a school in Prelovo, where the Second Podrinje Brigade’s First Battalion command was located, took the prisoners’ clothes off, beat them up and tied their hands with wire.
They then drove the civilians to a destroyed house in Musici, where they were shot dead. Their bodies were then thrown into Drina River.
The judge said that Milan Lukic, a Bosnian Serb paramilitary leader who was jailed for life for war crimes by the Hague Tribunal, took part in the execution of 18 of the captured civilians.
Three of the defendants in the trial in Serbia – Gojko Lukic, Dusko Vasiljevic and Dragana Djekic – were allegedly members of the Avengers paramilitary unit led by Milan Lukic.
The other defendant in the Belgrade trial is Jovan Lipovac, a Bosnian Serb Army soldier at the time of the crime, according to the indictment. The case against Lipovac was separated from the others due to illness, but has since been reunited with the case against Lukic, Vasiljevic and Djekic.
Two other Bosnian Serb fighters have already been convicted of the Strpci crime – Nebojsa Ranisavljevic, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison in Montenegro, and Mico Jovicic, who received a five-year sentence after pleading guilty before the Bosnian state court.
