Balkans

A court in Bijeljina sentenced former Bosnian Serb Army officer Velimir Popovic to five years in jail for violently abusing prisoners of war at the Ugljevik detention camp.

Former Croatian Defence Forces fighter Zemir Kovacevic is not guilty of killings, looting and the illegal detention of Serb civilians in the village of Sijekovac in 1992, his defence said.

More than two decades since it was burned down in the Bosnian Serb siege of the city, the Vijecnica, or City Hall, is preparing to reopen this summer.

The mass murders of Bosniaks from Srebrenica were committed as a result of a “command from the top”, the genocide trial of former Serb fighter Aleksandar Cvetkovic was told.

No remains of victims from the 1990s war from the Prijedor area have been found at Oborci locality, near Donji Vakuf, after two days of digging.

A Facebook group, featuring half-naked photographs of underage girls from all over former Yugoslavia, and which was shut down, has reappeared.

The Appellate Chamber of the Bosnian State Court sentenced a former member of the Croatian Defence Council, HVO, Drazen Mikulic, to a year-and-a-half in prison for crimes against a Bosniak civilian held in the Dretelj camp, near Capljina, in 1993.

The Bosnian State Investigation and Protection Agency arrested four former Croat fighters on suspicion that they committed war crimes including rape in the Odzak area in 1992.

Seven Bosnian Serb defendants pleaded not guilty on Wednesday before the Bosnian State Court for war crimes committed in Kotor Varos in 1992.

President Ivo Josipovic said that many war crimes still remain unprosecuted, sending the wrong message to Croatian society and to future generations. “The message that no crime can remain unpunished is important to future generations and to our society over the next few decades,” Josipovic told a round-table discussion on …