Iraqi Fighter Faces Bosnia War Crimes Retrial

Maktouf’s retrial will begin on July 4, the Sarajevo court heard on Tuesday, after his five-year sentence for wartime crimes against civilians in the Travnik area in 1993 was annulled.

According to the original verdict in 2006, Maktouf was guilty of aiding members of the ‘El Mudzahid’ Squad, a detachment of the Third Corps of the Bosnian Army made up of foreign ‘mujahideen’ volunteers, in taking two Croat civilians as hostages. After serving his sentence, he was deported to Malaysia, where he now lives.

This was one of several war crimes cases in which verdicts have been annulled because the 2003 Bosnian criminal code was wrongly used at the trials instead of the more lenient criminal code of the former Yugoslavia, which was in force at the time the crimes were committed.

Presiding judge Minka Kreho told the Sarajevo court that during the retrial, only evidence regarding the length of Maktouf’s sentence will be presented, not about his guilt or innocence.

After Tuesday’s hearing, his lawyer Adil Lozo told BIRN that he expected that the verdict would be reduced by four years and that Maktouf could get a one-year sentence.

Because Maktouf had served his before being deported, Lozo said he plans to file a suit to get compensation for the additional time that his client spent in custody.

Maktouf told BIRN that the “prosecution of Bosnia and Herzegovina charged the wrong person, and the court accepted that”.

Lozo said that it was strange that Maktouf was sentenced as an accomplice, while the perpetrators of the crime and those who ordered it have still not been prosecuted.

Maktouf’s is one of two dozen completed war crimes cases that Bosnia is retrying because the wrong criminal code was used at their trials.