Witness Recalls Father’s Death in Bosnia Village Attack

The prosecution witness testified on Thursday that she was told her father was murdered in Sijekovac in the Bosanski Brod municipality of northern Bosnia in March 1992, in an attack which also left several other Serb villagers dead.

“I heard on March 26 there were killings in the village, but I did not know my father was killed too,” said witness Ljiljana Mujagic, who gave evidence via video link from the district court in Rijeka in Croatia.

Mujagic said that she was living in Croatia at the time of the war’s outbreak, but her father Sreto Trivic had stayed behind in their family home in Sijekovac.

She said she spoke every day to her father, who sounded terrified but refused to leave home despite rising tensions in the area.

“I talked to him the day before [his death] and he told me: ‘I am not guilty, they would not kill me.’ We called hospitals and mortuaries [after the attack] and then a cousin called me and told me my father had been killed,” Mujagic said.

Her cousin found his body only five days later because it had been thrown into a pit near the river Sava, the witness explained.

“After the autopsy, they told us my father was first wounded in the chest and then shot in the back of his head,” she said.

Zemir Kovacevic, a former fighter with the First Bosanski Brod Brigade of the Croatian Defence Forces, is on trial for having taken part in the armed attack on the village of Sijekovac, where, together with others, he allegedly took 15 people and four children from their houses, some of whom were killed.

Mujagic said that neighbours from the village had told her that Kovacevic participated in the murders of two other families in Sijekovac in March 1992.

“Zemir’s name was not mentioned in relation to my father, but I heard it mentioned in relation to murders of the Zecevic and Milosevic families. I don’t know him personally, I only heard people saying that,” she said .

During cross-examination, the witness was asked why she did not mention during the investigation that she heard about Kovacevic’s participation in the murders; Mujagic responded that only at the beginning of the hearing when she heard the defendant’s name had she realised who he was, and that is why she mentioned the stories she had heard about him.

The trial will resume on September 18.