Serbia war crimes prosecutor indicts 2 on Zvornik killing charges News
Serbia war crimes prosecutor indicts 2 on Zvornik killing charges

[JURIST] Serbia's Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor [official website] indicted [press release, MHT] two war crimes suspects Tuesday in connection with the 1992 killing of 700 Muslim civilians in the town of Zvornik. Former Zvornik mayor Branko Grujic and former local defense chief Branko Popovic are accused of using their positions to detain and kill civilians. In 2005, prosecutors charged [indictment, MHT; BBC report] Grujic, Popovic and five others with murdering at least 19 Bosnian Muslim civilians. Theirs was the first war crimes case to be transfered from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) [official website] to Serbian courts. AP has more. Beta has additional coverage.

On Sunday, Serbian President Boris Tadic [official website] said that the country will fully cooperate with the ICTY to find and arrest Ratko Mladic [ICTY materials, PDF; amended indictment, PDF] and Goran Hadzic [ICTY materials, PDF; indictment, PDF], two war crimes suspects still wanted by the court after the arrest [JURIST report] of Radovan Karadzic [ICTY materials; JURIST news archive] in July. Both men were Serbian leaders during Yugoslavia's ethnic conflicts of the 1990s. Mladic faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for overseeing the Srebrenica [JURIST news archive] prison massacre and other killings of Bosnian Muslims and Croats, while Hadzic faces crimes against humanity charges for killings of non-Serbs and for abuses in Croatian prison camps. Tadic's pledge to cooperate with the court comes despite widespread protests [JURIST report] against the prosecution of Karadic by Serbian nationalist groups.