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Belgrade Higher Court. Photo: BIRN.
Defence witnesses at the trial of Danko Vladicic, who is accused of the murders of two Bosniak civilians in the village of Brod na Drini near Foca in August 1992, told Belgrade Higher Court on Friday that they saw him on a daily basis around this period, selling petrol and cigarettes on the streets of Belgrade.
Zoran Tomic, who first met Vladicic in the late 1980s, said he met the defandant again in Belgrade in the autumn of 1991.
“We started to hang out, I sometime brought him petrol and cigarettes [for selling],” Tomic said, adding that he saw Vladicic almost on a daily basis during 1992 and 1993.
Two other witnesses, who were either selling or buying smuggled goods, also claimed that for a couple of years from late 1991 they saw Vladicic in Belgrade on a daily basis.
During the 1990s, because of inflation and shortages and later due to UN sanctions on Yugoslavia, it was common to see people selling petrol from plastic bottles and cigarettes in the streets of the Serbian capital.
According to the indictment, on August 18, 1992, Vladicic entered the apartment of Ramo and Tima Vranjaca in Brod na Drini, near Foca, “armed with a military rifle and with black cream smeared on his face” and shot the married couple dead. Their bodies have never been found.
None of Friday’s witnesses could confirm or deny that they saw Vladicic on August 18 in Belgrade.
Vladicic denied the accusations at the start of trial.
“I was not there and I don’t know what this is about,” he told the court.
The indictment did not specify if he was member of any police or military unit, and Vladicic said he was not involved in any armed groups during the war.
The District Public Prosecutor’s Office in Trebinje in Bosnia indicted Vladicic for the crime in February 2019 and the Serbian Prosecutor’s Office for War Crimes then took over the case and indicted him in February 2021.
