A BOSNIAN Serb police reservist was yesterday found guilty by the UN tribunal for former Yugoslavia in The Hague of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his part in a Serb "ethnic cleansing" campaign against Bosnian Muslims.
The judgment in the case of Dusan "Dusko" Tadic was the first in a full length trial since the tribunal was set up by the UN Security Council in May 1993.
The UN tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda mark the first attempt to try war criminals before an international panel of judges since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after the second World War.
Tadic (41), looked pale and shocked as he heard the presiding judge, Ms Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, of the US, pronounce him guilty on 11 counts of persecution and beatings.
The panel of three judges found him not guilty on nine counts of murder and declared a further 11 charges inapplicable.
Before reading a summary of the 300 page judgment, Ms McDonald said that despite the high profile nature of the case, the judges' main concern had been to give Tadic a fair trial. "This, we believe has been done," she said.
During seven months of hearings last year, prosecutors alleged that Tadic had rounded up his former Muslim neighbours in the Prijedor region of northwest Bosnia in 1992 and had tortured, raped and killed them at Serbrun prison camps.
Tadic has always denied the charges and his lawyers said he had been a hapless victim of Muslims' desire to find a scapegoat for their suffering at the hands of the Serbs.
The former barowner and father of two girls was found guilty of taking part in Serb attacks on his home town of Kozarac and other villages and herding the inhabitants into camps where they were beaten and kept in inhuman conditions.
The tribunal found him guilty of complicity in the killing of two policemen but cleared him of 13 murders, saying conclusive evidence had not been presented to support those charges.
Tadic was also cleared of direct involvement in one of the worst atrocities mentioned in the indictment in which a prisoner in the notorious Omarska camp was forced to bite off the testicles of another prisoner.
Tadic will be sentenced at a separate hearing on July 1st, but this date will be postponed if defence lawyers make use of their right to lodge an appeal within 30 days.
Arrested in Germany in February 1994 while visiting family, Tadic has already spent more than three years in custody.
He faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment as the tribunal is not allowed to impose the death penalty.
Defence lawyers had argued that Tadic was a victim of mistaken identity or Muslim conspiracy to frame him, saying he had been performing routine police traffic duties on many occasions when he was said to have been committing atrocities.
But prosecutors portrayed him as a fervent Serb nationalist who bad played an active role in the systematic persecution of Muslims and taken a perverse delight in torture and killing.
Tadic is one of eight war crimes suspects held at the Hague tribunal's 24 cell detention centre. The former Bosnian Serb political and military leaders, Dr Radovan Karadzic and Gen Ratko Mladic, both indicted for genocide against the Bosnian Muslims, are still at large.
AFP adds:
In Sarajeveo, the Bosnian government yesterday expressed disappointment that the tribunal had acquitted Tadic on 13 counts of murdering Muslim prisoners.
However, a US based human rights group said the verdict represented an important benchmark for holding individuals accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity.