JURIST - Paper Chase: Bosnia war crimes court indicts former Croat soldier

[JURIST] The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) [official website] on Thursday indicted [press release] former Croat soldier Miroslav Anic for war crimes against Bosnian Muslim civilians allegedly committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian civil war [JURIST news archive]. The indictment alleges [Reuters report] that Anic and his unit were responsible for an attack on the village of Grahovc, where eight men were separated from their families and executed with automatic weapons. Anic and his unit are also allegedly responsible for "cleansing" the village of Han Ploca, where 20 men were executed in similar fashion, and murdering 38 more in the village of Stupni Do.

The BiH war crimes court was established in 2005 to reduce the caseload of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) [official website]. In January, the court sentenced [JURIST report] Sefik Alic, a Muslim commander, to 10 years in prison, overturning his 2008 acquittal. In December, the court convicted four former Bosnian Serb policemen [JURIST report] of killing at least 150 civilians during the Bosnian civil war. In November, suspected war criminal, Dragan Crnogorac, was arrested [JURIST report] on suspicion for having committed genocide in connection with the 1995 Srebrenica massacre [JURIST news archive] during the end of the Bosnian civil war. In August, Spanish officials extradited accused Montenegrin war criminal [JURIST report] Veselin Vlahovic, known as the "monster of Grbavica," to Sarajevo.