Briefly Noted
By IWPR staff in The Hague (TU No 375, 01-Oct-04)
Briefly Noted
By IWPR staff in The Hague (TU No 375, 01-Oct-04)
The prosecution recommended a sentence of 32 and 15- 20 years imprisonment for Blagojevic and Jokic respectively.
Blagojevic is a former commander of the Bosnian Serb army’s Bratunac brigade, which, according to his indictment, was actively involved in mass executions of 7000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica in 1995.
Blagojevic is charged on the basis of command responsibility for crimes his troops allegedly committed in Srebrenica. He is also charged with complicity in genocide.
Jokic was chief engineer of the Bosnian Serb army’s Zvornik brigade, and allegedly helped organise burials and reburials of thousands of executed Muslims.
Defence counsels for both Blagojevic and Jokic called for their clients to be acquitted.
IWPR will file a detailed report on the closing arguments in this case next week.
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Judges in the case of two Bosnian Muslim officers Enver Hadzihasanovic and Amir Kubura have rejected the biggest part of their lawyers’ motion for acquittal this week, keeping the majority of the charges against them.
The judges concluded that the prosecutors managed to present enough evidence to support claims that the two were responsible for the murder and torture of Croat and Serb civilians and prisoners of war, committed by the troops under their command during the 1993 war in Central Bosnia.
The prosecution maintains that some of the soldiers under their command were the foreign Islamic fighters grouped in the unit called El-Mujaheed, which committed a number of murders in detention centres in the towns of Zenica, Travnik, Kakanj and Bugojno.
Both Hadzihasanovic and Kubura are charged only on the basis of their command responsibility.
The defence part of their trial is scheduled to begin on October 18.
