BOSNIA:Bosnia's war crimes court yesterday sentenced an ethnic Serb former soldier to 29 years in jail and two others to 21 years each for the killing of 23 Muslim civilians early in the country's 1992-1995 war.
The court found Mirko Pekez, a second man also named Mirko Pekez and Milorad Savic guilty of the shooting in cold blood of unarmed men, women and children near the western town of Jajce in September 1992.
The trio forced the group, among them 10 women, a small child and three minors, out of their homes and "ordered them to line up next to the edge of a cliff and started firing bursts at them, killing 23 and wounding four persons", the court said.
In a separate verdict the court jailed for nine years Dusan Fustar, one of four Bosnian Serbs charged with the persecution, killing, imprisonment and rape of non-Serbs at Keraterm detention camp in northwestern Bosnia.
Fustar's case was tried separately from that of the other defendants after he pleaded guilty.
The former mechanic, who worked as a shift commander at the camp, surrendered in 2002 to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and was transferred for trial in Bosnia in 2006. Some 1,500 Muslims and Croats were held in Keraterm and hundreds are thought to have been killed.
Bosnia's war crimes court was set up in 2005 to take pressure off the UN war crimes tribunal and take over low- and mid-level cases as the UN court plans to wind down by 2010.
Meanwhile, the ICTY cut jail terms for two former Bosnian Muslim commanders, Gen Enver Hadzihasanovic and Brig Amir Kubura, convicted for atrocities committed by their troops against Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb civilians.
The men, among the highest-ranking Bosnian Muslims to stand trial in The Hague, were found guilty in 2006 of failing to prevent or punish atrocities by troops under their command, including foreign Islamic mujahideen fighters. The appeals chamber ruled it was not proven Hadzihasanovic had effective control over Islamic fighters who fought with their fellow Muslims during the war.
- (Reuters)