Bosnia-Herzegovina's state court has sentenced five ethnic Serb ex-policemen to prison terms for committing war crimes against Muslim Bosniak civilians during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War.
Milan Djokic and Branislav Trisic were sentenced on June 8 in the first instance to three years in prison each, while Zoran Tanasic, Zarko Milanovic, and Mladen Krajisnik got two years in prison each.
They were all found guilty of torturing Bosniaks in the Bijeljina area in the northeastern part of Bosnia from April 1992 until the end of September 1994 on political, national, ethnic, cultural, and religious grounds.
They were acquitted of the accusation of crimes against humanity, while three other defendants, Savo Mrsic, Milivoje Cobic, and Milan Markovic, were acquitted on all counts.
Djokic was the police commander of Janja from the end of 1992 to June 1993, and later became the deputy commander. Tanasic, Milanovic, and Krajisnik were police officers in Janja, while Trisic was an operative of the State Security Service.
Janja is located 10 kilometers south of Bijeljina.
The trial that began in 2016 initially included three more defendants, but two of them died in the meantime, while a third one was deemed incapable of standing trial because of illness.
Bijeljina was the site of a massacre committed in early April 1992 by local ethnic Serb paramilitaries and by the Serb Volunteer Guard, a Serbia-based paramilitary group led by Zeljko Raznatovic, known as Arkan, a former soccer hooligan. Up to 80 people, mostly Bosniaks, but also ethnic Serbs suspected of "collaboration" were killed during the massacre.
More than 100,000 people were killed in the Bosnian conflict, which ended with a U.S.-brokered agreement that divided the country and its administration largely along ethnic lines among Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats.