Saric Trial Witness Pleads Ignorance of Police Tasks

Mladenko Borovcanin, former operational assistant to the Commander of the special police brigade of Republika Srpska, said that in June and July 1995 he was present in the Sarajevo battle zone with four units.

“At that time the commander of the special police units was Goran Saric and our command was in Janja… Between June and July 1995 four of our units were around Sarajevo – the units from Sekovici, Foca, Ilidza and Jahorina. I was with two units in Srednje and Saric was in Semizovac or Vogosca,” Borovcanin said.

The witness then said an order came that part of the unit from Sekovici should return to base. Only later, Borovcanin said, did he learn that part of the Sekovici unit was deployed to Srebrenica.

“I never laid eyes on that area,” he said, meaning Srebrenica. “All I can tell you is information I have from media or discussions with colleagues. I learned that part of the Sekovici unit was deployed [there], but how, when or who, I do not know,” he said.

Answering questions from prosecutor Ibro Bulic, the witness said special police units were used for “fighting assignments”, on the order of the Republika Srpska interior ministry.

As former commander of the Bosnian Serb interior ministry’s special police brigade, Saric is accused of involvement in the capture and murder of Bosniaks from Srebrenica.

The prosecution says Saric ordered police to watch over the Bratunac-Konjevic Polje road and capture thousands of Bosniaks who were then trying to escape the Bosnian Serbs who had overrun the UN-protected area of Srebrenica. Fleeing through the woods, many of the escapees were shot.

After that, the indictment says, members of the special police brigade’s Sekovici squad took several hundred prisoners to agricultural warehouses in the village of Kravica and executed around 1,000 or more of them.

In a separate case, Saric was earlier sentenced to 14 years in jail for sending several dozen detained civilians to prison camps and others to their deaths in Sarajevo in 1992.

The witness said that Saric’s deputy, Ljubomir Borovcanin, was also in Sarajevo in the summer of 1995, but was then sent to the Podrinje area. “I believe he was named as chief of police units in the area, but I could be wrong,” said the witness.

In 2010 the Hague tribunal sentenced Borovcanin to 17 years in jail for crimes in Srebrenica. He is currently serving his sentence in Denmark.

Saric’s trial will resume on December 17.