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The state prosecutor, Stanko Blagic, asked for a one-month custody for Demirovic, suspected of the rape of one female, due to a risk of influencing witnesses or accessories.
“The plaintiff has been refusing to testify for years. She has a problem to come. She is terrified,” said the prosecutor.
The prosecutor explained that the measure of forbidding the defendant to meet witnesses or accessories would not be sufficient, since there is no way to control the measure. “That measure is only declarative in nature,” he said.
The lawyer, Nijaz Djuliman, asked that Demirovic be issued with restrictive measures, explaining that none of the witnesses asked for any kind of protection nor they were afraid.
Djuliman said that the plaintiff had been living for over 20 years in another country and that Demirovic did not contact her.
“Around 95 per cent of examined witnesses did not say the suspect committed this act… In our knowledge, the witness was taken out by anyone who wanted to do it, they called out her name from the hall,” said Djuliman.
Demirovic was arrested on Wedneday, October 15, under suspicion that in 1993 he raped several times the protected Witness B, whom he took out of the school in Potoci near Mostar.
The indictment has already been filed against Demirovic, charging him, as commander of the 47th Mountain Brigade of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with participating in the abuse of over a hundred Croat civilians, among them a large number of children, women, elderly and women in advanced stages of pregnancy, locked up in detention facilities in the village of Potoci in 1993.
Along with Demirovic, the same indictment also charged Enes Curic, Samir Kreso, Habib Copelj and Mehmed Kaminic.
The decision on the request for custody will be made at a later date.
