Witness at Vrucinic Trial Describes Seeing Visible Injuries on Sanski Most Prisoners
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Mirko Vrucinic, the former chief of the public safety station and member of the crisis committee in Sanski Most, has been charged with participating in a joint criminal enterprise aimed at persecuting the non-Serb population from April to December 1992.
Dusko Zoric, a former crime technician at the public safety center in Sanski Most, testified at today’s hearing. He said in 1992 he filled in for a colleague of his and took statements from detainees. He said the detainees had been brought from the Betonirka factory to his office at the public safety station.
Acting upon his colleague’s instructions, he asked the detainees whether they were members of political parties and whether they possessed weapons, among other questions. Zoric said he took their statements with a representative of the state security service.
He said if they determined there were no grounds for detention they recommended the release of the detainees. If they uncovered that detainees illegally owned weapons, they proposed that their detention continue.
“Some people were beaten up. They had visible injuries caused by blows and beating their bodies,” Zoric said. He said not all of the detainees were injured.
Zoric said he also went to the Manjaca military detention camp to take statements from detainees who’d been transferred there from Sanski Most.
He said he accompanied Dragan Vujanic to Manjaca with a convoy of detainees from the Betonirka factory. He said when they arrived they didn’t want to admit several detainees to Manjaca.
Zoric said a man named Vujanic, the manager of the Betonirka detention facility in Sanski Most for a period of time, told him they didn’t want to accept the detainees.
“Some of those people were sent back, because it was a work camp and they didn’t want to accept them in Manjaca, because they were incapable of performing labour,” Zoric said.
He said detainees were shot at on their way back to Sanski Most. He said he heard they were shot because they wanted to run away.
Zoric said he that heard about 20 detainees suffocated to death while being transported to Manjaca.
The trial will continue on December 4.
