Serbia Again Convicts Wartime Fighters for Bosnia Train Abductions

This post is also available in this language: Shqip Bos/Hrv/Srp The Belgrade Higher Court on Tuesday sentenced three wartime Serb fighters to a total of 25 years in prison for participating in the abduction of 20 non-Serb passengers from a train in Strpci station in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993. All the captive passengers were subsequently killed. In the verdict, which follows a retrial, Gojko Lukic and Dusko Vasiljevic were sentenced to ten years in prison each and Dragana Djekic to five years. According to the indictment, the victims in the Strpci case, mainly Bosniaks, were taken from a train at Strpci station to a school in Prelovo and assaulted. They were then taken to a burned-out house in the village of Musici, where they were executed. Families of victims criticised the length of legal proceedings. Nail Kajevic, whose brother, Nijaz, was one of the victims, said that they “cannot feel at all comfortable [with] the fact that the trial is taking so long, or that two of the five defendants have died, and did not receive their sentences. “Until now, no attempt has been made in Serbia to prove and determine who the organisers and instigators of the crime were, because it was not a thoughtless act of a group or an individual but a coordinated, planned kidnapping,” Kajevic told Radio Free Europe. The three people in 2023 received the same sentences – but the Belgrade Court of Appeals quashed the first-instance verdict some months later. Since the original trial started in 2019, two of the defendants have died: Jovan Lipovac in February 2024, while Ljubisa Vasiljevic died in July 2021 Ten other wartime Bosnian Serb soldiers have already been convicted of involvement in the Strpci crime, in Bosnia and in Montenegro. The Bosnian state court sentenced the former commander of the Interventions Company of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Visegrad Brigade, Boban Indjic, to 15 years in prison in January 2024. In October 2022, the Bosnian state court also found seven former soldiers from the Bosnian Serb Army’s Second Podrinje Brigade guilty of involvement in the abductions and murders. The judge in the trial said that Milan Lukic took part in the execution of 18 of the captured civilians. The Bosnian court sentenced Mico Jovicic, a paramilitary volunteer from Serbia, to five years in prison after making a plea bargain in 2016. Another paramilitary volunteer, Nebojsa Ranisavljevic, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the Strpci crime by a court in Montenegro. Milan Lukic, the alleged mastermind of the Strpci crime, is currently in prison in Estonia after the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, sentenced him to life imprisonment for other crimes committed in the Bosnian war, not for the Strpci killings. He was indicted for the Strpci crimes by the Bosnian state prosecution in 2019. A BIRN analysis noted that, during his trial, many of the defence witnesses portrayed Lukic as solely responsible for the Strpci crime.