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The trial chamber of the Hague tribunal allowed the prosecution to reopen its evidentiary hearings on June 22, on the grounds that the Tomasica mass grave wasn’t discovered until 2013 – after Hague prosecutors had already finished presenting evidence against Mladic.
According to a previous estimate, Hague prosecutors plan on inviting six experts and seven witnesses to testify on the exhumation of approximately 500 victims from the Tomasica mass grave.
The questioning of Savo Simic, the former artillery commander of the First Sarajevo Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army, was concluded at this hearing. He said Serb forces did not target civilians in Sarajevo, but responded to Bosnian Army fire which came from the city.
Prosecutor Adam Weber tried to demonstrate that this statement was false.
Weber presented Simic with a report written by the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps commander in 1995, which stated that the Bosnian Serb Army opened fire on residential settlements outside of combat activities, wasting ammunition as a result.
“That warning was sent to all of the brigades…I don’t know which ones targeted settlements,” Simic said.
Simic also denied that the Bosnian Serb Army shelled Sarajevo several times during December 1992, causing civilian casualties, among them children.
“We just defended our position,” Simic said.
Mladic, the former commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, has been charged with the widespread persecution of Bosniaks and Croats, which reached the scale of genocide in some municipalities – among them Prijedor. He has also been charged with genocide in Srebrenica, terrorizing the population of Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
Mladic’s defense will call its next witness after the Hague prosecutors present their additional evidence.
