Reuters AlertNet Lite - Bosnian indicted for war crimes on video evidence

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Bosnian indicted for war crimes on video evidence

01 Feb 2007 14:44:25 GMT
Source: Reuters

SARAJEVO, Feb 1 (Reuters) - Bosnia's war crimes court indicted a Bosnian Muslim wartime commander on Thursday for instigating the killing of Croatian Serb soldiers in 1995, after he was reportedly recognised in an amateur video.

Sefik Alic was arrested in November following the broadcast of amateur video footage showing ethnic Serbs from Croatia being harassed by Croatian and Bosnian troops while fleeing "Operation Storm", a Croatian army offensive in August 1995.

The court said Alic took part in "Storm" and "participated in the physical and mental abuse" of four Croatian Serb prisoners of war, who were later killed by soldiers under Alic's command.

"The accused... instigated their killings and failed to undertake measures to punish the perpetrators," the court said in a statement.

The dead bodies were left uncovered as a warning to other Serb soldiers, the indictment said. In addition, Alic failed to report the killings to his superiors or take any action to have the perpetrators investigated and punished.

Alic served in the Fifth Corps, which operated in western Bosnia. Its commander Atif Dudakovic was shown in another video allegedly giving orders to burn Serb villages in the last weeks of the 1992-95 Bosnia war and is now under investigation.

Dudakovic has dismissed the accusations as politically motivated and said the film was fabricated.

Bosnia's war crimes chamber was established in 2005 with international judges and prosecutors working alongside locals to try higher level local war crimes cases and alleviate some of the workload of the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

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Last updated:Thu Feb 1 14:45:19 2007