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Bosnia Charges 25 Muslim Wartime Officers, Four Bosnian Serbs With War Crimes


Former Bosnian Army commander for Srebrenica Naser Oric after being acquitted by a Bosnian court in October
Former Bosnian Army commander for Srebrenica Naser Oric after being acquitted by a Bosnian court in October

Bosnian authorities have charged 25 Muslim wartime officials and four Bosnian Serb officers with committing war crimes against civilians and prisoners of war in the country's bloody 1990s conflict.

Prosecutors in Sarajevo said on December 29 that 11 former Muslim members of the Bosnian Army were charged with taking part in an attack against the Serb village of Cemerno in the region of Ilijas, north of Sarajevo, in which 30 people were killed.

In another case, 14 former Muslim police and military officials were indicted for war crimes allegedly committed against dozens of Serbs in the southern region of Konjic, the Sarajevo state prosecutor's office said.

Ten of the indicted men are already in detention, it said.

Their crimes allegedly included the "murder of several dozen Serb civilians, both men and women of different age, torture, robbery and persecution of nearly the whole Serb population from the Konjic area," the prosecutor's office said.

On December 28, the prosecutor's office said it had indicted four Bosnian Serb army officers for alleged genocide against Muslims who were fleeing the eastern town of Srebrenica after it fell into Serb hands in July 1995.

The four officers from the eastern town of Vlasenica are accused of stopping a convoy carrying Muslims fleeing the Srebrenica massacre of boys and men, then separating men from women and robbing them.

"The women were raped and sexually molested, while more than 20 men were taken and detained in a nearby school, where...they were kept in inhuman conditions...and on July 13-14 (1995) taken and executed in the village of Mrsici," the prosecutor's office said.

Bosnian Serbs, Bosniak Muslims, and Croats alike committed war crimes during Bosnia's 1992-95 conflict, though the majority of those convicted by local and international war crimes courts have been Serbs.

Serb victims' associations often denounce the Bosnian judicial system for not doing enough to prosecute war crimes against them.

They were outraged over the acquittal in October of Naser Oric, who commanded Bosnian Muslim troops in the war, which left some 100,000 people dead.

With reporting by AFP and Reuters
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