prijava
SARAJEVO, February 16 (FENA) - Former special police commander Goran Sarić was acquitted of involvement in genocide in Srebrenica in 1995 as the court ruled he was not necessarily aware of the plan to murder the town’s Bosniak population.
The state court in Sarajevo on Friday cleared Goran Sarić, a former commander of the Bosnian Serb Interior Ministry’s special police brigade, of involvement in genocide in July 1995.
“On the basis of pieces of evidence presented, the court has not been able to determine, beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant knew about the genocidal intention of the main perpetrators,” said presiding judge Staniša Gluhajić, BIRN reports.
Gluhajić said that the prosecution had not been able to prove the counts in the indictment which charged Sarić with having been aware of the existence of a plan for killing the Bosniak population of Srebrenica.
The judge also said it was not apparent from the evidence that Sarić had interacted with the participants in the joint criminal enterprise aimed at expelling and killing Bosniaks from Srebrenica, Bosnian Serb military and political leaders Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić.
Sarić was acquitted on charges of issuing instructions for the massacres, and cleared of exercising control over his deputy Ljubomir Borovčanin, who the Hague Tribunal sentenced to 17 years in prison for crimes in Srebrenica.
The court said there was no evidence that Sarić issued any type of orders to Borovčanin or lower-ranking chiefs of the special police brigade.
Borovčanin was freed in 2016 after serving two-thirds of his sentence.
Sarić was also found not guilty of assisting members of the joint criminal enterprise in committing genocide, which resulted in more than 7,000 deaths and around 40,000 people being displaced.
He was further acquitted of committing war crimes in the Zvornik area.
According to the court, there is no evidence that the defendant saw the Srebrenica captives or the Bosniaks who were killed.
The trial of Sarić has lasted around four years.
The verdict can be appealed.
(FENA) S. R.
