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Bosnia war crimes court jails three

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Three Bosnian Serbs have been sentenced to between three and 15 years in prison by the U.N. war crimes tribunal sitting in The Hague.

Dusko Sikirica, Damir Dosen and Dragan Kolundzija admitted to crimes against humanity while working as guards at a Serb-run Bosnian detention camp at Keraterm in 1992.

The trio were sentenced on Tuesday to 15, five and three years in jail respectively.

The court's three judges had taken into account that the accused expressed remorse and had entered guilty pleas, presiding judge Patrick Robinson said.

"A guilty plea is always important for the purpose of establishing the truth in relation to a crime," the judge said in a 30-minute presentation of the judgement.

The men were sentenced for taking part in persecution and confinement of Muslims and Croats in "inhumane conditions" at the camp near Prijedor.

Keraterm was one of three main camps in northwestern Bosnia used by Serbs to detain Muslims and Croats during "ethnic cleansing" in the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Prisoners at the camp were beaten, tortured and murdered.

Sikirica admitted that murders took place at the camp and confessed to shooting one person dead.

Prosecutors had requested a 17-year jail sentence for Sikirica, who said he was head of security in the camp.

They called for Dosen and Kolundzija, guard shift commanders, to be sentenced to seven and five years in prison, respectively.

War crimes prosecutors dropped charges of genocide against Sikirica and Dosen in September in exchange for guilty pleas to charges of persecuting Muslims and Croats.

Meanwhile, forensic experts have begun digging up a mass grave believed to contain the bodies of 180 Muslims slain by Serb soldiers during the Bosnian war, an official said.

The grave, located in the grounds of a Muslim home in Liplje, holds the remains of people executed after the nearby town of Srebrenica fell to the Serbs in 1995, Murat Hurtic, the regional head of the Muslim Commission for Missing People, said on Tuesday.

Srebrenica was declared a U.N. "safe haven" toward the end of Bosnia's 1992-95 war, and thousands of Muslims flocked there to escape Serb attacks.

But Bosnian Serb troops later overran the town, rounding up and executing men and boys.

Some 8,000 Muslims were believed killed in the massacre, considered the worst in Europe since World War II. The remains of half of the victims have been found in various mass graves in the area.

The Liplje site is the sixth mass grave containing bodies of Srebrenica victims that were reburied by Serbs from previous sites to conceal evidence of the crime.



 
 
 
 


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