Vranjes et al: Sentence against Indictees Reduced

“The first instance verdict pronounced on October 28, 2011 is hereby revised in terms of legal qualification of the crime and sentence, so the indictee’s actions for which they were pronounced guilty under the mentioned verdict are now being legally qualified as ‘war crimes against the civilian population’. The indictees are now sentenced to eight years in prison each,” the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina announced.

The rest of the verdict remains unchanged.

Under the first instance verdict Vranjes and Milic were sentenced to ten years in prison for having assisted in the murder of civilians in Kotor-Varos.

Vranjes and Milic were found guilty of having come to Nenad Tesic’s house, accompanied by another person, on June 6, 1992, knowing that brothers Ivo, Zdravko and Viktor Grgic were in the house. Indictee Vranjes ordered the men to come with them for an examination.

“After that indictee Milic transported the civilians and his colleagues to the municipality building in Kotor-Varos, where the civilians were ordered to go to a monument erected in honour of World War Two victims. The third person opened fire at them, killing Ivo and Zdravko Grgic, while Viktor, who was shot in his hand twice, ran away from there,” the verdict says.

Vranjes was a member of the Public Safety Centre in Banja Luka and Milic was a member of the Republika Srpska Army, VRS.

Goran Markovic was originally charged along with Vranjes and Milic with the same crime, but his case was separated from the case against the two indictees at the beginning of the trial. In December last year the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina transferred the case against Markovic to the District Court in Banja Luka, as a territorially competent court.