SERBIA: Serbs sentenced for videotaped Muslim killings near Srebrenica in 1995

A Serbian war crimes court found four Serb paramilitaries guilty for the 1995 murder of six Bosnian Muslim youths in Bosnia war. Four Serbian paramilitary soldiers who videotaped their killing of six Bosnian Muslim youths in the last days of the 1992-95 Bosnia war were found guilty on Tuesday (April 10) by Serbia's war crimes court. The sentences for the men, all members of the notorious Scorpions paramilitary group, ranged from 5 years to the maximum sentence of 20 years. One defendant was acquitted. The paramilitaries videotaped the execution-style killing. The video was found by a Serb human rights activist and was broadcast in Serbia in 2005, shocking a public which until then had dismissed charges of Serb atrocities in the war as propaganda. The film has the men taunting the youths before herding them to a clearing in the woods and shooting them in the back. Scorpions chief Slobodan Medic and his aide Branislav Medic were sentenced to 20 years in jail. Pero Petrasevic, the only defendant to plead guilty, got 13 years. A fourth man got a five-year sentence and a fifth was acquitted. Relatives of the victims, who arrived from Bosnia in two minivans and were brought into the court under heavy police escort, said that all defendants deserved the maximum sentence. "I am not satisfied, they came to our village and killed our kids and one of them is posted free and another got only 5 years in prison. How can I be satisfied? This is a disgrace," said the Nura Alisphaic, mother of one victim. Beko Delic, whose brother was killed, was also shocked by the sentences. "I would like to choose four of them and kill them, like they chose my brother, and then let's see how many years in jail I would get," he said. Only one of the accused had pleaded guilty, Pero Petrasevic, bodyguard of Scorpions chief Slobodan Medic. Zoran Levojac, Petrasevic's lawyer, said his client was treated too harshly. "Considering that my client confessed to the crime I think that 13 years is way too much, the judge didn't take his confession as an attenuating circumstance". The killing took place in southeast Bosnia the same week that Bosnian Serb troops killed some 8,000 Muslim males in Srebrenica, 150 km away. The six victims in this case were also from the wider Srebrenica area, but the court said there was no proof of a link with the Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two. Bosnian Serb wartime military chief Ratko Mladic and his political boss Radovan Karadzic, both charged with genocide by the United Nations tribunal in The Hague for orchestrating the Srebrenica massacre, are still on the run. Croatia has already sentenced to 15 years in jail one member of the Scorpions, a Croatian Serb, also identified by the video.

ITN Source | April 11, 2007

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