Witness Did not See Indictee with a Gun

Mujo Cakar, who lived in the Visegrad area at the beginning of the war, told the Court that an unknown soldier once stopped him in the vicinity of Pantelic’s house and checked his personal identification documents.  
 
“The soldier took me to a house… He then called Milos out. When Milos came, he asked him: ‘Milos, who is this?’ Milos told him that I was a neighbour of his. After that I was released,” he said.
 
The witness explained that he had known indictee Pantelic from before the war and that he had never heard that he “made some scandal”.
 
“Milos did not carry weapons. I did not see him participating in any operations, setting something on fire or anything like that,” he said.
 
Pantelic is charged, along with Predrag Milisavljevic and Ljubomir Tasic, with having participated in the persecution of the Bosniak population as part of an attack by the Republika Srpska Army, VRS, police and paramilitary formations from April to the end of June 1992.  
 
According to the State Prosecution’s charges, Milisavljevic and Pantelic were members of reserve police forces in Visegrad, while Tasic was a member of the VRS.
 
Responding to the Defence’s questions on whether Uzeir Cakar and Salko Sabanovic told him that indictee Pantelic had beaten them, the witness said that they had never said anything like that to him and that he had never heard about it.
 
Testifying for the Prosecution of Bosnia and Herzegovina in June this year, witness Uzeir Cakar said that indictee Pantelic slapped him while he was detained in a metal container in Donja Lijeska village, while Sabanovic, who testified in March, said that the indictee hit him in the school building in Orahovci village.
 
A statement given by witness Dervisa Alisehic was read at this hearing. A court expert said that this witness was not capable of testifying before the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina due to her health condition.
 
In her statement given in 2012, which was read by Prosecutor Dzevad Muratbegovic, she said that she was in Kabernik village in 1992, when soldiers came and took some people away. Her brother was among those persons.
 
“After they had taken him away, we fled to the woods. When I got there, I saw my other brother Rasid. We were hiding for about ten days,” the statement says.
 
On that occasion the witness said that she had never found out what happened to her brother, who was taken away in 1992.
 
The witness mentioned Milos Pantelic, among others, while speaking about soldiers and a truck in her statement.  
 
His Defence said that, in case it was given an opportunity to examine the witness, it would ask her to describe that even in detail.
 
All Defence teams objected to the inclusion of her statement as evidence, explaining that, the witness was sick even prior to giving her statement in 2012, so she might not have been capable of speaking about wartime happenings at that time either.
 
The trial is due to continue on December 17.