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“It was night. Two men with a flashlight intruded the house. They began kicking us. They were yelling: ‘Get up, you Chetniks, we shall kill you’. They switched the light on and I recognised Mustafa Covic, known as Muco,” Jovanovic recalled.
The witness said that he thought that, after the light had been switched on, the other man hit his cousin Mico Jovanovic in his groins.
Jovanovic said that he was taken away for examination, where he found out that the other man’s name was Ibracevic.
“Did I ask him what his name was … I asked him if he was related to Faruk Ibracevic, an official from Srebrenik. He told me that it was his brother. He asked me where we had been, why we had gone to Smoluca, whether there were any soldiers …” the witness said.
As he said, while Ibracevic was examining him, Mustafa Covic “played with a rather big knife”, sticking it into the table, and expressed his surprise by the fact that Jovanovic had not surrendered.
Indictee Ekrem Ibracevic asked the witness whether a policeman was sitting with them during the conversation, but Jovanovic said that he could not remember him.
The Prosecution of Bosnia and Herzegovina, BiH, charges Ekrem Ibracevic, Faruk Smajlovic and Sejdalija Covic with having tortured and abused Serb civilians in the local community premises in Rapatnica and football club premises from June to August 1992.
Witness Jovanovic said that they were transferred to a prison in Tuzla at the beginning of August and that they were escorted by “Ibracevic and his team”.
As he described, while they were driving, Lazar Stanisic showed him his “back distorted by burns”.
During the examination the Defence of the indictees focused on the first part of Jovanovic’s testimony, in which he said that he worked as policeman until the beginning of the attack on his village Potpec, that he went to Smoluca, Lukavac municipality, together with other local residents and that he returned to Potpec with his cousin.
When asked whether, being a policeman, he reported to his superior, when he stopped coming to work, the witness said that he was not able to do it. As he said, he carried a rifle and pistol with him during that time, because it had been assigned to him. He said that he buried it in the woods prior to their arrest.
Jovanovic categorically rejected the suggestions that he was member of any armed formations, confirming that he saw the “armed population” in Smoluca.
Responding to questions by the Defence attorneys, Jovanovic confirmed that he and a few other detainees refused to be exchanged, when they drove them from Rapatnica towards Smoluca in late July.
The witness was held in the Tuzla prison until March 1993, after having been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for “being a member of the enemy Army”.
