Krsmanovic: Screaming next to Burning Mosque

“I recognised Oliver Krsmanovic and Milan Lukic. Other men were present as well, but I recognised these two. Their faces were painted with soot and colour. They were loud and screaming,” Omerovic said, saying that smoke was coming out of the mosque, but there was no flame.

She left her village of Babin Potok, along with her daughter, and went to the town, hoping that she could join a convoy and leave Visegrad. However, when she saw that the mosque was on fire, she went back.

Milan Lukic, former leader of the “Beli orlovi” (“White Eagles”) paramilitary formation, was sentenced, under a first instance verdict pronounced by the Hague Tribunal, to life imprisonment for crimes committed in Visegrad.

The indictment alleges that Krsmanovic, former member of the Second Podrinje Light Infantry Brigade of the Republika Srpska Army, participated and assisted in the murders, rape and forcible disappearances of the Bosniak population from Visegrad.

Witness Mujesira Memisevic told the Court that, while she was in Dusce village, Visegrad municipality, where she lived, she watched Lukic and others taking her husband Ibrisim and other Bosniaks from the Varda Factory. She said that those men were then killed on the banks of the River Drina.

“One of them was skinny. It was most probably this man, who is sitting right there,” Memisevic said, referring to the indictee.

The indictment alleges that, on June 7, 1992 Krsmanovic assisted in the murder of six people, who were taken from the Varda Factory and killed on the River Drina. He is charged with having participated in setting a house in Bikavac village on fire. It is alleged that more than 70 Bosniak children, women and the elderly, who were detained in the house, were burnt in it.

Witness Memisevic said that she was in the vicinity of the house in Bikavac, when it was set on fire in the evening hours. She said that, in the morning she went there, along with her neighbour, to check what had happened.

“We saw bones that looked like wooden logs. Smoke was still coming from the burnt bodies,” the witness said, adding that she did not see Krsmanovic that day.

The trial is due to continue on Tuesday, September 11.
M.T.