Poor Recollection of Stories about Captives

Witness Vitomir Jovic, who worked as a driver and car mechanic with the Zvornik Brigade in 1995, said that he was on a field mission in Krajina in July and August 1995, when he heard about the fall of Srebrenica.
 
He said that, upon his return at the beginning of September, he heard “some stories told when people gather and consume some alcohol, all of them were hearsay stories”. He found out that his comrades from the Engineering Unit were deployed, as sentry, to Orahovac, Zvornik municipality, in July 1995 and to a location near Crni Vrh.
 
“Rumours said that there were some captives and that they were transported to various locations,” the witness said, adding that he had poor recollection of where those captives from Srebrenica were transported.
 
The Prosecution reminded Jovic of a statement from 2009, in which he specified that the captives were transported to a place near Petkovci and Pilica, as well as some other places, and that they were shot. The witness did not deny that.
 
Stanisic and Milosevic are on trial for having committed murders on a dam, near Petkovci, Zvornik municipality, where about 1,000 previously captured Srebrenica residents were shot in mid-July 1995.
 
The witness said that some colleagues, whose name he could not remember, told him that they participated in transporting corpses that lasted several nights, but they complained to their superiors due to a fear from epidemics, so they stopped driving them.
Jovic said that the bodies were transported by tippers and that he saw the tippers being washed. According to what he heard, the bodies were transported to pits in the woods.
 
The witness said that he transported firewood to families of killed soldiers and that he saw the machinery and freshly dug soil on the territory of Lipanj.

Jovic said that he saw Ostoja Stanisic and Marko Milosevic in the military barracks several times, but he did not receive any orders from them.

The trial is due to continue on August 27.