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Witness Zaim Saric said that he stayed in Jablanica, as a physician in the Dispensary, for a certain period of time during the war.
“We established a war hospital in the dispensary building. There were no medical instruments, so it was not easy to create the conditions, but we organised ourselves as we went along,” Saric said, adding that patients included both local citizens and wounded members of the Croatian Defence Council, HVO, and Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The witness said that doctors treated all patients in a professional manner irrespective of their ethnicity.
“As far as I can remember, four rooms were reserved for Croats. (…) I once noticed that a younger man, approximately of my height, was quarrelling with a guard. He wanted to visit patient Ilija Kaleb,” Saric said, adding that he removed the man from there. As he said, the man told him that he was “Zuka’s man”.
Responding to a question by the Defence, the witness said that he did not hear that any of the patients were mistreated and that he would have known that. Also, he said that he had never heard that a member of the “Zulfikar” unit pulled an infusion needle out of a patient’s arm.
“Even if this happened, the patient’s life would not have been endangered, because no life-threatening bleeding could have happened,” the witness said.
Saric said that he knew indictee Nihad Bojadzic but he had never seen him at the hospital. He did not exclude the possibility that Bojadzic had come there, but he said that he did not personally see him.
“I heard that Nihad Bojadzic helped other people,” Saric said.
Bojadzic, former Deputy Commander of “Zulfikar” Squad with the Army of BiH, ABiH, is charged with having tortured, sexually abused and raped Croats, who were detained in “The Battle of Neretva” Museum in Jablanica, as well as the Rogica houses in Donja Jablanica, in the second half of 1993. Besides that, he is on trial for having committed other crimes in Jablanica in 1993.
Witnesses Merima Dzino and Zijada Babic, who worked as nurses in the war hospital in Jablanica, testified at this hearing as well.
Both witnesses said that they knew indictee Bojadzic and that they occasionally saw him at the hospital, when he visited the wounded members of the “Zulfikar” Unit. When asked whether he was shaved or not at that time, they were not able to answer.
Dzino and Babic said that it was not possible that Bojadzic or somebody else mistreated patients, who “belonged to different ethnic groups”, adding that they were guarded by members of military police.
“Had any incidents happened, I would have heard about them when taking over my shifts,” Dzino said, adding that wounded HVO members were accommodated in the best part of the hospital.
The trial is due to continue on October 16.
