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The Basic Court in Prijedor has admitted that it destroyed the file on the murder of five people because the 10-year timeframe for keeping it had passed without a sentence being handed down.
The file contained material about the investigation into the murders of five members of the Ecimovic family in Tukovi in 1992.
Former Bosnian Serb fighters Milorad Radakovic and Goran Pejic are currently on trial for crimes against humanity over the murders of the five relatives, all of them Croat civilians.
“The cases represented records of evidence from one-off investigative actions. It was noted down in the record file that they referred to a crime scene inspection concerning the death of Tomo Ecimovic and others, without a legal classification of the crime, which was impossible at that stage of the process,” said Dusko Miloica, the president of the Basic Court in Prijedor.
According to Miloica, the court was obliged to keep the records for 10 years after the archiving date in 1992, because no sentence has been pronounced in the meantime. He said this was in line with the Rulebook on Internal Operations of Regular Courts issued in 1976, which was in force at that time.
But officials from the Archive of Republika Srpska, Bosnia’s Serb-dominated entity, in which Prijedor is located, said they were unaware of the existence of the 1976 rulebook.
“Investigative cases cannot be classified as worthless due to the simple reason that they have not been completed,” said Zoran Mackic, an official at the archive.
Legal experts said that it because it was a serious murder case, even though it was not initially classified as such in 1992, the investigative file could not be considered worthless material and should not have been destroyed.
“All pieces of material evidence, even a simple handwritten note, should be kept,” said lawyer Izet Bazdarevic.
The state prosecution has said it would look into the matter in order to determine whether those who ordered the destruction of the evidence had committed any crimes.
During the trial of Radakovic and Pejic, prosecutor Izet Odobasic accused the Prijedor police and judiciary of a cover-up attempt.
“The prosecution of Bosnia and Herzegovina considers that judicial and police bodies from Prijedor concealed evidence from this case, obstructing the investigation,” Odobasic said.
Other lawyers have told BIRN that they have had similar experiences with the destruction of evidence by other courts as well.
Lawyer Adil Draganovic said he did not want to speak about the Radakovic and Pejic case, but had witnessed situations in which files had been destroyed in other cases.
“There was a situation in which I asked for documents referring to a case in which I represented one of the parties, and all I got was an empty envelope,” Draganovic said.
Nenad Kovacevic of the Bosnian state court, who was the president of the Basic Court in Teslic in 1992, recounted a similar experience.
Kovacevic said that the Basic Court received a request to conduct an investigation into several people suspected of various crimes including the disappearance of about 30 Bosniaks.
However, the case file “disappeared from the Teslic court”, he said.
