prijava
BELGRADE/SARAJEVO, June 12 (FENA) - A former Bosnian Serb deputy interior minister told the trial of eight Serb ex-policemen that army security chief Ljubiša Beara triggered a massacre of Bosniaks from Srebrenica in the village of Kravica in 1995.
Tomislav Kovač, who was deputy interior minister in the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska entity in July 1995, when the Kravica massacre happened, told Belgrade Higher Court on Tuesday that Ljubiša Beara, who at the time was the security chief of the Main Headquarters of the Bosnian Serb Army, was to blame for the killings, BIRN reports.
“He [Beara] was the trigger… [for] this process of killing prisoners of war to start. The person who should have prevented it, ordered it,” Kovač said.
According to the indictment, Bosnian Serb forces killed 1,313 Bosniaks from Srebrenica in a hangar at a farm in Kravica on July 13 and 14.
The killings in Kravica were among several massacres after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995, that left more than 7,000 Bosniak men and boys dead.
Serb ex-policemen Nedeljko Milidragović, Aleksa Golijanin, Milivoje Batinica, Aleksandar Dačević, Bora Miletić, Jovan Petrović, Dragomir Parović and Vidosav Vasić are on trial in Belgrade for organizing and participating in the shootings.
Kovač said that the Bosniak prisoners attacked one of their guards, a member of Bosnian Serb police special forces, took his gun and shot him dead because they had already come under attack themselves from a member of the Serb forces, Milan Lukić, who was under Beara’s command.
“That is why those Muslims attacked them, because they were shot at by the other side, that has been established,” Kovač told the court.
“He [Lukić] shot at them and then one of them came to that special policeman and killed him,” he added.
The killing of the special policeman sparked the massacre, Kovač testified.
“When the prisoners killed that soldier, they [other Serb troops] responded so brutally that many of them were tried for that, some in The Hague, others in Sarajevo,” he said.
Kovač described the massacre as “an incident” because “it happened without premeditation”, and repeated during his testimony that the Bosniaks were prisoners of war, rather than civilian detainees.
He also insisted that the defendants in the trial, who he described as “deserters”, were not at the hangar in Kravica at the time of the killings.
Kovač himself was indicted for genocide in Bosnia in January 2018.
Beara was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 by the Hague Tribunal for the genocide against the Bosniaks in Srebrenica. He died while serving his sentence in Germany in February 2017.
Aleksandar and Vladimir Šešelj, two sons of convicted war criminal and Serbian MP Vojislav Šešelj, attended Tuesday’s hearing as spectators. Aleksandar Šešelj is also an MP in the Serbian parliament.
(FENA) S. R.
