prijava
BELGRADE/SARAJEVO, May 24 (FENA) - The landmark trial in Belgrade court for the massacre of Bosniaks from Srebrenica in the village of Kravica was postponed because a defendant reportedly slit his wrists several days before the hearing.
The lawyer for Dragomir Parović, one of eight former Bosnian Serb police officers charged with killing some of the 1,300 Bosniak victims in Kravica, told Belgrade Higher Court on Wednesday that his client had intentionally injured himself and been admitted to hospital.
President of the Association of Victims and Witnesses of Genocide Murat Tahirović said in a statement to FENA that the trial was interrupted on Wednesday, stating that one of the indictees did not attend the hearing with an explanation of the lawyer that Parović was sent to the Psychiatric unit after he had slit his wrists.
Given that no medical documentation was submitted in relation to this incident, the trial judge scheduled a continuation of the trial / hearing for today and ordered Parović to be taken to the courtroom.
However, in the meantime, the Court was informed by the Ministry of Interior in Novi Sad that Parović was admitted to the Psychiatric Hospital, and confirmed that he had committed self-harm, most likely, during attempted suicide, so that the trial was interrupted and a new hearing was scheduled for 30 May, when the new circumstances should become clearer.
Tahirović says, that in the meantime, the accused Parović, acknowledged the responsibility for the crimes committed in the Kravica Agricultural Cooperative and called on the other seven of his co-defendants confirming their involvement in those crimes.
“According to my unofficial information, Parovic cut his veins about ten days ago... He is currently in a psychiatric ward,” Parović’s lawyer Vladan Stefanović told the court.
Stefanović said that he could not substantiate what happened to Parovic because he only found out on Monday and had no time to get the hospital records.
He added that he was informed about Parović’s current condition by his client’s ex-wife, and suggested that the court officially requests the hospital documents.
But presiding judge Mirjana Ilić noted that hearings in the Kravica case have been repeatedly postponed due to various defendants, including Parović, claiming they were sick.
Ilić ordered that Parović be brought to court for the next hearing, which she scheduled for Thursday.
Before the hearing was postponed, there was an argument between families of the victims and the nationalist leader Vojislav Šešelj, who came to support the defendants along with members of his Serbian Radical Party.
Šešelj was telling the victims’ family members that there was no planned murder of 1,300 Bosniaks in Kravica, and hurled insults at Staša Zajović from the anti-war NGO ‘Women in Black’, saying she should have been strangled at birth.
The court security did not react for about 15 minutes, until one spectator demanded that they interrupt Šešelj. The head of security said that the two groups might be physically separated in future hearings.
The killings in the warehouse in Kravica were among several massacres by Bosnian Serb forces after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995 that left at least some 7,000 Bosniak men and boys dead.
Eight former members of a police special brigade from Bosnia’s Serb-led entity Repubika Srpska are indicted for committing a war crime against civilians in Kravica on July 14, 1995.
Nedeljko Milidragović, Aleksa Golijanin, Milivoje Batinica, Aleksandar Dačević, Bora Miletić, Jovan Petrović, Dragomir Parović and Vidosav Vasić are accused of organizing and participating in the shooting of more than 100 civilians in the warehouse.
Serbian prosecution charged them in 2015 and the trial opened in February 2017, but was plagued by delays.
So far more than 1,300 Bosniak civilians who were massacred in the warehouse in Kravica have been identified, after their bodies were found in several mass graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
(FENA) S. R.
