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Milos Stanic said that until May 1992 he lived in Novi Grad, where he was imprisoned into the gymnasium of the secondary school in Odzak. Among the guards in this school, he said, was Josp Tolic.
“Josip Tolic hid me whenever some tumult was about to happen, when someone was supposed to come. He told me: ‘Get over there now, have some beer, have a cigarette,” the witness said.
Asked by the prosecutor, Milorad Barasin, why Tolic tried to hide him, Stanic explained that Tolic’s mother-in-law and father-in-law were house friends of the witness’s sister.
Tolic is on trial, as member of the 102nd Odzak Brigade of the Croatian Defence Council, for participating between May and October 1992 in the abuse of Serb prisoners in the territory of Odzak and Bosanski Brod.
The witness said that he was moved from Odzak to a school in Novi Grad, where Tolic, together with another two guards, offered him to escape. Asked whether this was offered to anyone else, the witness said yes, to a man named Luka.
He was then moved from Novi Grad to Bosanski Brod, and from there he was taken to dig trenches.
“I mostly went to dig trenches because the food was better there. Someone would come to the door and say they needed people to dig and I would volunteer. Many of them went because of the food,” said Stanic, adding that the trenches were being dug for the army.
Stanic said that in November 1992 Tolic assisted his exchange.
“The exchange happened because Tolic’s mother-in-law and father-in-law were my sister’s house friends. He told me I was going to be exchanged,” the witness said.
The trial will resume on October 24.
