prijava
SARAJEVO, November 30 (FENA) - The Appellate Chamber of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina today released former members of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina Naser Orić and Sabahudin Muhić charges of war crimes against prisoners of war in 1992 in the Srebrenica area.
Judge Tihomir Lukes pointed out in the explanation of the verdict that Orić and Muhić were acquitted due to unreliability of the key protected witness O-1, due to the change of testimony, while the testimonies of other witnesses and the presented evidence were insufficient to prove guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
He stated that the Prosecutor's Office of BiH failed to prove that Orić and Muhić had killed prisoners of war: Slobodan Ilić, Mitar Savić and Milutin Milošević.
Nobody from the Prosecutor's Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina attended the pronouncement of the verdict.
Speaking about the murder of prisoner Slobodan Ilić, Lukes said that the key protected witness, codenamed O-1, had changed his statements about decisive facts.
“The testimonies given by witness O-1 before the first- and second-instance chambers differed significantly. His testimonies are contradictory and not substantiated by other pieces of evidence,” the judge said.
On the murder of prisoner Milutin Milošević, Lukes said the testimony given by O-1 was unreliable.
“It is readily apparent that the [witness’s] statements were contradictory and unreliable with regards to decisive facts… The statement given by witness O-1 before the appeals chamber differed from his testimony before the first-instance chamber,” he said.
Lukes also said that during the investigation, O-1 failed to mention the murder of prisoner Mitar Savić and did not provide valid reasons for not talking about it.
The defense also raised questions about whether O-1 could have been there at the time of the murder, introducing a piece of evidence that showed that O-1 was severely wounded on December 11, 1992, and the operation in Kunjarac, where Savić was killed, happened three days afterwards.
The retrial was held after the state court’s appeals chamber quashed the original acquittal of Orić and Muhić in June this year.
The original trial was highly controversial because Orić 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.
Before the original trial started, the defense asked the UN tribunal in The Hague to order a halt to the proceedings against Orić, 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”.
Friday’s verdict is final and cannot be appealed.
(FENA) S. R.
