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| Europe |
| Serbia: Croatian Serb gets ten years for war crimes |
| 2009-05-28 |
| [ADN Kronos] A special Belgrade war crimes court on Wednesday sentenced a Croatian Serb, Bora Trbojevic, to 10 years in jail for imprisoning, torturing and killing Croatian civilians during the country's war of secession from the former Yugoslavia in 1991. Trbojevic was a member of a rebel Serb unit and was charged with crimes and killing civilians in two villages near Grubisno Polje in eastern Croatia. The court's presiding judge Snezana Garotic Nikolic said the trial had proven beyond doubt that Trbojevic was responsible for killing an unspecified number of civilians and that the sentence was "appropriate". Thirty witnesses testified during the eight-month trial. Bruno Vekaric, a spokesman for the Serbian prosecutor, told the media that the verdict was a "result of good regional cooperation between the Serbian and Croatian judiciary". Trbojevic was originally tried in absentia by a Croatian court in 1993 and was sentenced to 12 years. But the appeals panel increased the sentence to 20 years in jail. Trbojevic later escaped to Serbia and the case was turned over to the Serbian court for a new trial. The Hague-based United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has indicted 161 individuals and has sentenced over 60 to over one thousand years in jail. Since the tribunal is planning to wind down next year, the remaining cases have gradually been turned over to local courts in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia. |
| Posted by:Fred |