Bosnian Serb General Found Guilty of Hiding Mladic

It sentenced him to a six-month parole sentence.

The Court established that Lugonja had hidden Mladic in his apartment in Belgrade in September 2002.

At the time, Mladic, who was the commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, VRS, during the war in the 1990s, was hiding in an attempt to avoid extradition to the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, ICTY.

He was charged with genocide in Srebrenica and seven other municipalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, as well as the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats, terror against the local population in Sarajevo, and taking UNPROFOR members hostage.

Tuesday’s verdict stated that Lugonja provided Mladic with food, as well as other supplies, despite knowing that the former commander of the VRS Main Headquarters had been indicted before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and that an arrest warrant against him had been issued.

“The Court has established that Lugonja committed the crime of helping a crime perpetrator, considering the fact that the defendant himself admitted having committed the crime, that he admitted Mladic to his apartment at the urging of general Zdravko Tolimir, that Mladic stayed at his apartment for five or six days, that it was his choice to admit Mladic to his apartment and that he knew that an indictment against Mladic had been filed before the ICTY and that an arrest warrant against him had been issued. He helped Mladic because he was his commander,” the verdict explanation reads.

ICTY sentenced Tolimir in 2015 to life imprisonment, but he died before it was implemented.

Lugonja will not serve the six-month sentence unless he commits the same or a similar crime within the next year.

According to the same verdict, Stanko Ristic, Ljiljana Vaskovic, Borislav Ivanovic, Predrag Ristic, Sasa Badnjar, Ratko Vucetic, Tatjana Janjusevic Vaskovic, Bojan Vaskovic and Blagoja Govedarica have been acquitted of charges of hiding Mladic.

The Appellate Court has determined that the Public Prosecution of Serbia has not proved that, in various periods from 2002 to 2006 they helped Ratko Mladic avoid being discovered despite knowing that the ICTY had issued an arrest warrant against him and requested his extradition after having filed an indictment against him.

According to the first instance verdict pronounced in May last year, the First Basic Court in Belgrade rejected the charges against all of the 11 defendants, explaining it did it due to a statute of limitations.

The Appellate Court has determined that “the statute of limitations has not expired” in this case, but “the public prosecutor has not offered sufficiently clear and convincing evidence to support its charges during the course of the trial”.

The parties have the right to file an appeal against this verdict with the Serbian Supreme Court.

Mladic was arrested in 2011 after having been on the run for more than a decade. The pronouncement of the first instance verdict against him is expected to take place in November this year.