Kravica: Witness recognises three indictees

Predrag Celic, a Prosecution witness in the trial of 11 indictees charged with the murder of around a thousand Bosniaks, said that Milenko Trifunovic commanded the Third Detachment of Special Police Sekovici in Skelani, near Srebrenica, in July 1995.

However, he denied statements in the indictment that Trifunovic had led the soldiers and policemen who escorted the line of detained Bosniaks towards Kravica.

Celic was a member of the Second Detachment of Special Police Unit Sekovici, which, according to him, was commanded by indictee Milos Stupar until June 1995. Celic recognised Stupar in the courtroom.

According to Celic’s testimony, on July 12 and 13 his platoon received an assignment to distribute themselves along the road from Sandici towards Bratunac and to”close the road as much as possible”, that is to “secure it from the Muslims who were in the forest”. He was in a house close to the road with three policemen including Brano “Dzin” Dzinic, who is one of the 11 indictees.

According to this witness, on the morning of July 13, 1995, Dzinic and another soldier went towards Konjevic Polje and returned in the evening of the same day.

In the courtroom the witness said that on July 13, 700 to 800 Bosniaks went down the road from Sandici towards Bratunac, in the direction of village Kravica, in lines escorted by members of Army of Republika Srpska whom he did not know.

After the lines of people passed, Celic said, he heard shooting but did not pay any attention “because at that time shooting and detonations were a daily occurrence”.

He claims that only later he found out from a member of his detachment that one of the detained Bosniaks took a shotgun from a soldier called Krle and that he killed him in the storage shed.

The prosecutor pointed out that when this witness was questioned during the investigation in Zvornik on October 27 last year, he stated that the group of around a thousand Bosniaks was escorted by RS Army members, but also members of the Third Detachment of Special Police from Seklani.

In the record read by the prosecutor it was written that Celic said that after soldier Krle was killed, all the detained Bosniaks were killed.

Today the witness denied these statements from the record and explained that he and the colleagues who questioned him “must have had a misunderstanding”.

The trial will be continued on July 21, 2006.