Mladic Witness Denies Serb Mortar Attacks

Defence witness Subotic told the UN-backed war crimes tribunal in The Hague on Tuesday that Bosnian Serb forces were not responsible for a deadly attack on a sports field during a football match in the Dobrija area of Sarajevo on June 1, 1993.

Ten people were killed in the attack and around 100 injured.

Subotic’s testimony was part of an attempt by Mladic’s defence to discredit the prosecution’s evidence about the deadly incident.

The witness told the court that the first examination of the crime scene took place two years after the attack, and that as a result, the crime scene was contaminated.

“They wrongly marked the area from which the mortar allegedly came,” she said.

Subotic insisted the match was not played in a parking lot in front of a building, as the indictment states, but on a nearby football field.

Mladic’s lawyer Branko Lukic also read a document from the Bosnian Army intelligence service, which said that seven of those killed and 50 of those injured were soldiers.

Mladic, the former commander of Bosnian Serb forces, is on trial for terrorising the population of Sarajevo through a series of shelling and sniping incidents, the attack on Dobrinja among them.

He is also charged with genocide in Srebrenica and other municipalities, persecution of non-Serbs across the country and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

Subotic also gave testimony about a blast in Vase Miskina Street in Sarajevo on May 27, 1992 which killed 28 people who were waiting in a bread queue, despite the fact that this incident is not in the indictment against Mladic.

She said the mortar bomb used in the attack was fired from 100 to 120 metres away, while the nearest Bosnian Serb positions were 1,700 to 1,800 metres away.

She also alleged that after staging the attack, Bosniak forces fired sniper shots at survivors.

The trial continues on Wednesday.