Koricanske stijene: Night on Board a Bus

The State Prosecution charges Zoran Babic, Milorad Radakovic, Milorad Skrbic, Ljubisa Cetic, Dusan Jankovic and Zeljko Stojnic, former members of the Public Safety Station in Prijedor and the Interventions Squad with the same Station, with the murder of about 200 civilians at Koricanske stijene on August 21, 1992, after having separated the civilians from a convoy traveling from Prijedor to Travnik.

“On my arrival in Tukovi, I saw people, women and children. Ten minutes later the buses arrived and parked. They told us to get on the buses. I left voluntarily. Nobody beat me, mistreated me or did any harm to me,” Blazevic said, adding that the bus was “crowded with people”.

He said the bus stopped only once, in Skender-Vakuf, when “an officer came and said the bus had broken down”.

“So we spent the night in the bus. Our escort, as far as I could see, did not leave the bus and stayed with us the whole time,” Blazevic said, identifying the third indictee as the escort in his bus.

The witness said some “members of the Serb Army” wanted to take the passengers out of the bus during the night.

“Some soldiers came, members of both regular and paramilitary forces, but Mr. Skrbic did not let them take us and told them to leave. He told the soldiers to go away from our bus. A man, a tall man with a beard, wanted to take me out, saying he allegedly recognized me and saw me in Banja Luka. Skrbic told him it must have been somebody else and not me,” Blazevic said.

The witness recalled all the passengers having been transferred to trucks and driven to “a plateau in the vicinity of old Travnik town” the following day.

“When we arrived, Mile took me by the hand and walked with me for some 500 meters, because the bearded man was still there waiting for me. This is how
he saved my life,” Blazevic said.

The second witness, Milojko Crnogorac, was one of the drivers in the convoy traveling from Prijedor on August 21, 1992.

“As far as I can remember we left Trnopolje and moved to Vlasic on that day. Our passengers were the people who had stayed in a collection center in that town. As far as I can remember nobody escorted my bus,” Crnogorac said.

The witness said his bus “broke down” on Mount Vlasic. He then stopped one of the buses going back to Prijedor, loaded the passengers and continued his
travel to Travnik.

“The bus broke down a short time later. I remember having tried to fix it but it was getting dark. There were some soldiers in the vicinity. I was very tired, so I went there and spent the night. I know that somebody guarded the passengers, but I do not know whether it was a soldier or somebody else. I got up in the morning, but the passengers were no longer in the bus. Soldiers told me some trucks came and drove those people away,” the witness said.

Skrbic’s Defence presented 11 pieces of material evidence at this hearing. Most of them referred to medical documents by which they sought to prove that the third indictee suffered from “psycho-neurosis”.

The next hearing is due to take place on February 22, when the Defence of Ljubisa Cetic will examine its first witness.