prijava
SARAJEVO, September 17 (FENA) - The former Bosnian Army commander in Srebrenica, Naser Orić, is being retried for war crimes over the killing of three Serb captives in 1992 after being acquitted in his original trial.
The retrial of Naser Orić and his Bosnian Army subordinate Sabahudin Muhić for the killings of three Serb prisoners in the villages of Zalazje, Lolići and Kunjerac in the Bratunac and Srebrenica areas in 1992 opened on Monday at the state court in Sarajevo, BIRN reports.
The retrial is being held after the state court’s appeals chamber quashed the acquittal of Orić and Muhić in June this year.
The original trial was highly controversial because Oric is seen as a hero by many Bosniaks for his role in defending Srebrenica in the years before the 1995 massacres, while some Serbs have claimed that the charges against him should have been more severe.
After the presentation of introductory statements, a former Bosnian Serb Army soldier, Radivoje Ostojić, gave testimony, recalling how he was wounded twice during a Bosnian Army attack on the village of Zalazje on July 12, 1992.
“I lost a lot of blood,” Ostojić said, adding he saw one of the three Serb victims, Dragan Rakić, during the attack.
He said he and other Bosnian Serb troops then went into Rakić’s house; a Bosnian Army soldier peeked in, but did not see them.
“At that moment, somebody in the neighboring house gave an order: ‘All of you shoot at the white house [Rakić’s house] with all available weapons,’” Ostojić recalled, adding that he was shot in the buttock when the Bosnian Army troops opened fire.
But Orić’s defense lawyer Lejla Čović said that in a statement given by Ostojić during the investigation of the case in 2006, the witness claimed to have been shot in the stomach area.
The retrial is due to continue on September 24.
Before the original trial started, the defense asked the UN tribunal in The Hague to order a halt to the proceedings against Oric, arguing that he had already been tried for and acquitted of war crimes in Srebrenica by the Hague court and should not stand trial for the same crimes twice.
The Hague Tribunal rejected the request, with the judge saying that “the murder charges in the Bosnian indictment fundamentally differ from the murder charges in the Hague indictment with respect to the alleged victims and the nature, time and location of the alleged crime”.
Earlier this month, the prosecutor in the Orić case, Miroslav Janjić, said he had received death threats from a witness who testified in the original trial.
Defense lawyer Čović said that she had also received threats from the same witness, as had her client Orić.
(FENA) S. R.
