The United Nations' war crimes court at The Hague has ordered the retrial of two former senior Serb officials from Slobodan Milosevic's regime who previously had been acquitted of involvement in war crimes during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
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The ruling on December 15 by Fausto Pocar, the presiding judge at International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, overturned the 2013 acquittals of Jovica Stanisic and Franki Simatovic.
Stanisic was the head of Serbia's state security service until Milosevic fired him in 1998 and Simatovic had been Stanisic's deputy.
Prosecutors said they had a command role in setting up notorious Serb paramilitary gangs within the Serbian security services that committed atrocities in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Balkan wars from 1992 to 1995.
They have been formally charged with taking part in a campaign of ethnic cleansingaimed at driving non-Serbs out of parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia.
