SARAJEVO: Bosnia’s war crimes prosecutor on Thursday charged a former Bosnian Serb police chief with helping commit genocide during the 1995 massacre in the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, officials said.
The charge came a day after Bosnia’s war crimes court sentenced the former police general, Goran Saric, to 14 years in prison for his role in the killing of Muslim civilians during the 1992-1995 siege of Sarajevo. The prosecutors said in a statement that Saric, as the commander of Bosnian Serb special police units, had also helped the Bosnian Serb army “to commit genocide in Srebrenica,” when 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in July 1995.
A few months before the end of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, Bosnian Serb forces captured Srebrenica, a UN-protected Muslim enclave, and loaded thousands of men and boys onto trucks.
Over several days in July 1995, they executed some 8,000 of them and threw their bodies into mass graves. Saric’s units took part in expelling Srebrenica Muslims, disarming UN peacekeepers protecting the eastern Bosnian town and separating men and boys from the rest of population before they were taken to execution sites, the charges said.
His units were also involved in arresting thousands of Muslim men and boys who had tried to escape and bringing them back to the execution sites, the statement added.
Two international courts have ruled the Srebrenica massacre, the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II, a genocide.
On Wednesday, Saric, a 48-year old retired police general, was sentenced by Bosnia’s war crimes court to 14 years in prison for crimes against humanity committed against Muslim civilians in Sarajevo at the beginning of the conflict.
He was arrested in November 2011.
Some 100,000 people were killed and two million fled their homes during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia, a former Yugoslav republic that currently has a population of 3.8 million.
The Bosnian war crimes court was set up in 2005 to ease the caseload of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
Ex-Bosnian Serb police chief charged for Srebrenica massacre
