prijava
BELGRADE/SARAJEVO, September 19 (FENA) - A Belgrade court sentenced Nikola Vida Lujić, a former member of Serbian State Security’s notorious Special Operations Unit, to eight years in prison for raping a woman in Brčko in Bosnia in June 1992.
Belgrade Higher Court on Thursday convicted Nikola Vida Lujić, a former member of the Special Operations Unit, an elite Serbian special forces unit also known as the Red Berets, of raping a Bosnian woman in Brčko on June 20, 1992, and sentenced him to eight years in prison.
According to the indictment, Nikola Lujić, together with two other unidentified fighters, entered a house in Brčko on the day of the assault, wearing a uniform and armed with a gun.
He pulled out the weapon, loaded it with bullets and put it back in his pocket in front of a woman who was in the house, whose identity was not disclosed in the indictment.
After she handed over her money and jewelry, Nikola Lujić said “Come with me”, took her into the bathroom and locked the door. He raped her twice in the bathroom and then took her into the bedroom and raped her again, the charges allege.
During the assault, the victim asked Lujić to kill her, to which he replied he was “not in charge of that”, the indictment says. While he was raping the woman, the two other soldiers broke everything in the house.
Judge Dejan Terzić said that there were no mitigating circumstances and noted that Lujić, who was not present in court for the verdict, had been previously convicted of a similar crime.
“He used his dominance over the victim and her helplessness because she was already scared enough because her husband had been arrested,” Terzić said.
Lujić insisted during the trial that he was not a member of any armed unit during the war and that he did not know the victim.
But other witnesses, among who was a member of the Red Berets, said Lujić was a member of the Special Operations Unit, whose members have been accused of involvement in a number of wartime, and post-war crimes.
The victim’s husband testified during the trial that on the day of the crime, a group of Serb soldiers came to his house and took him away for interrogation. After he came back, a neighbor told him that his wife had been raped.
The indictment was originally issued by Brčko District Prosecutor’s Office in Bosnia and Herzegovina in January 2018. But because Nikola Lujić is a Serbian citizen, the case was transferred from the District Court in the Bosnian town of Doboj to the High Court in Belgrade, and the trial started in December 2018.
This is a first-instance verdict and can be appealed, BIRN reports.
(FENA) S. R.
