Extinguishing Burning Bodies

The Prosecutor read statements by witnesses Kadira Kljaic, Ajka Music and Tima Susic given to the Prosecution of Bosnia and Herzegovina last year and witness Besim Music given to the State Investigation and Protection Agency, SIPA, in 2006.

“We heard shooting. After that some soldier entered our house and grabbed my husband Rasim. They threw him out of the house and pushed him towards the gate. More men were standing on the road,” Susic said, describing “a horrible event” that took place on July 23, 1992.
She was sitting in room with her son, when they heard a burst of fire.

“I knew that they killed them. My son was crying. I consoled him. He kept saying: ‘Mum, they are dead’,” Susic said, adding that she found out from her neighbours later on that her husband and other men from the village were killed in front of the mosque.

According to the charges, on July 23, 1992 Zoran Babic and Velemir Djuric, who were accompanied by other persons known to them, took male residents from their houses in Carakovo village, took them to a local mosque and shot them. They allegedly did that as per an order by Dragomir Soldat.

The indictment alleges that some of the men, who survived the shooting, died after indictees Djuric and Babic had set the mosque on fire, because burning parts of the mosque collapsed on to their bodies.

Witness Ajka Music said that, one morning in the summer of 1992 soldiers came to her house and forced her husband Hasib to come out to the road, before taking him in front of the mosque.

“I was too afraid to come out of the house. Later on a neighbour told me that they were killed in front of the mosque,” Music said.

Besima Music said that her brother was taken to the mosque, along with other neighbours, in the morning hours on July 23, 1992.

“My neighbour Hasnija Music told me that all of them were lying dead in front of the mosque. We went there and tried to extinguish the burning bodies. My brother’s leg had been burnt. I saw the intestines of two of my neighbours hanging out of their bodies,” the statement alleges.

Witness Kadira Kljaic said that a soldier came to her house, where she lived with her husband and children, in July 1992 and took her husband away.

“I watched them leaving. They left towards the mosque. A while later the mother and wife of Kemal Kahteran, who too had been taken away, came and told me that all of them had been shot,” Kljajic said.

She said that she went to the mosque a few days later, adding that her husband’s body was lying next to the mosque fence.

The trial is due to continue on June 26.