SERBIAN WAR CRIMINAL RATKO MASLENJAK TRIED IN UNITED STATES

AKRON, USA (October 5,2007) - Guilty verdicts were returned against Serbian war criminal Ratko Maslenjak,currently living in Akron,USA, accused of making false statements on US immigration documents, Gregory A. White, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, said.

The jury convicted Serbian war criminal Ratko Maslenjak, 48, of 2783 Old Home Road, after a five-day trial in the courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge Solomon Oliver Jr., White said in a press release.

The evidence presented during the trial revealed that Maslenjak failed to disclose on two immigration documents the fact that he had served as an officer in the genocidal paramilitary formations of the Serbians living in Bosnia (VRS), during the 1992-1995 Serbian aggression against Bosnia.

His failure to list that fact affected the decisions of U.S. immigration officials in first allowing Serbian war criminal Maslenjak to achieve refugee status and later permanent resident alien status, the release said.

An investigation conducted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Republic of Yugoslavia into allegations that the paramilitary forces of the Serbians living in Bosnia (VRS) was involved in acts of genocide and persecution against Bosnian civilians in Srebrenica in July of 1995 resulted in the seizure of the VRS military records, the release said.

Those records indicated that Maslenjak's brigade had been part of those operations in which units of the paramilitary forces of the Serbians living in Bosnia (VRS) committed genocide.

A pre-sentence investigation has been ordered and sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 8, 2008.

Identifying and removing persecutors and human rights violators from the United States is one of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's top enforcement programs.

To achieve this goal, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) created its Human Rights Violators Unit, with a specific mandate to deny safe haven to human rights violators by bringing to bear a full range of investigative techniques and legal authorities to identify, locate, investigate and remove them from the United States. ICE has currently identified more than 800 cases from 85 countries involving suspected human rights violators.

ICE encourages the public to provide any information they may have regarding human rights abusers living in the United States. In the United States anonymous tips may be reported at 1-866-DHS-2ICE (1-866-347-2423).