Bosnian Serb Fighter ‘Didn’t Execute Muslims at Mosque’

Witness Zoran Coric testified at the court in Sarajevo on Monday that he was told by an inspector from Bosnia’s State Investigation and Protection Agency that there was a case against one of the three defendants, Velemir Djuric, so he contacted him to tell him about it.

“Djuric told me: ‘It has troubled me since then,’” recalled the witness, a former policeman in Prijedor.

He said that Djuric told him that he arrived in the village of Carkovo, where the Bosniaks were executed, by accident after getting a lift from the driver of a truck while he was having a day off.

“People were executed there and he happened to be there,” said the witness, adding that the defendant said that he did not participate in the killings.

Babic and fellow ex-fighter Zoran Babic are accused of taking Bosniak men from their homes in Carakovo on July 23, 1992, acting on orders from the third defendant, Dragomir Soldat, and then shooting them dead outside the village mosque.

The indictment alleges that some of the men who survived the shooting died soon afterwards when Djuric and Babic set the mosque on fire.

According to the indictment, Soldat was a military policeman in the 43rd Motorised Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army, Djuric a member of the Intelligence Centre, and Babic a reservist policeman, a member of the First Intervention Platoon at the police station in Prijedor.

The prosecution and defence’s closing arguments in the trial are scheduled for February 17.