TWO WITNESSES TESTIFIED BEFORE BOSNIAN STATE COURT AT TRIAL OF SERBIAN WAR CRIMINAL MILORAD TRBIC

SARAJEVO, Bosnia (January 29,2008) – At the trial of genocide indictee Milorad Trbic, the Bosnian State Prosecutor has examined two witnesses.
Giving testimony at the Bosnian State Court yesterday were Desimir Djukanovic, former employee in the Communal Services Company in the eastern Bosnian town of Bratunac, and one protected witness, a former member of the genocidal Serbian aggressor's formations.

The indictment charges Serbian war criminal Milorad Trbic with having deliberately participated in the forcible deportation and mass murder of Bosnian civilians from the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica in the period from July 11 to November 1, 1995,during the Serbian aggression against Bosnia.

Djukanovic said he was told by Dragan Mirkovic, also known as Kinez, to collect bodies of murdered Bosnian civilians in front of the elementary school in Bratunac "one morning in July 1995.

"We packed the corpses into green and black bags. The bodies we collected were in the school and in its courtyard, in the streets and around the monument. We loaded them onto a tractor trailer. I do not know where they were driven from there," Djukanovic said.

In the course of the examination, a recording made on March 28, 2007 was played. The recording shows Djukanovic showing an investigator from the Bosnian 1`State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA) the locations where the witness had found the corpses, and the location of the mass grave in Glogova.

The video recording showed the witness saying: "I found 15 to 20 bodies by the school side, seven in the vicinity of the gym and at least ten next to the monument. I saw at least a hundred corpses at the playground, but I did not collect those." He also said that two dredgers were "by the mass grave" all the time and, as soon as the tractors brought the corpses, the dredgers would cover them with earth.

In the courtroom, Djukanovic confirmed that the recording was authentic, but he kept giving contradictory answers concerning the locations at which he found the bodies and whether he personally visited the mass grave or heard about it from others.

Another,protected,witness said that, in July 1995, he saw Bosnian civilians being forced by the Serbian aggressor into the buses in Potocari. The buses took them to Bratunac, where he guarded them.

"That day, upon my return home, I saw tens of buses on the road leading to the school in Bratunac. The men who were in those buses seemed hungry, thirsty and scared. Some female civilians were standing by the buses. They cursed those men and wanted to batter at the buses, so we had to stop them from doing that," the witness said, adding that he saw some Serbian aggressor's soldiers taking five or six Bosnian civilians out of the school building in Bratunac and lining them up by the school wall".

"I heard shooting and I went back. Later on I saw three killed men at the playground," the witness added.

The trial of Serbian war criminal Milorad Trbic is due to continue before the Bosnian State Court on January 29.