Cases Closed: Deaths of Ageing Balkan War Suspects Thwart Justice

When the trial of a group of Serb fighters accused of the abductions and killings of passengers who were seized from a train in Bosnia during the war in 1993 continues at Belgrade Higher Court next month, there will be one fewer defendant in the dock.

That is because one of the accused, Ljubisa Vasiljevic, died in early July - the most recent of several dozen war crimes defendants in the former Yugoslavia who have died before the verdicts in their trials, making it even harder to get justice for the victims of the crimes committed during the 1990s wars.

According to the Serbian indictment, Vasiljevic was one of a group of fighters who went to a small railway station at Strpci near the Bosnia-Serbia border on February 27, 1993 and forced the train dispatcher to stop a train that was travelling from Belgrade to Bar in Montenegro.

Some of them entered the carriages, started checking passengers' identity documents, and took 20 people off the train. All of them were non-Serbs - 18 Bosniaks, one Croat and one person whose identity remains unknown to this day.

The fighters loaded them into a military truck and drove them to an elementary school in the nearby village of Prelovo. There the captives were beaten, ordered to take off their clothes and robbed of money and valuables.

Wearing nothing but their underwear, with their hands tied behind their backs, the victims were driven to a burned-out house in the village of Musici, where they were executed in groups of two or three.

Vasiljevic was the second defendant on trial for the Strpci crime to have died this year. The case against former Bosnian Serb Army soldier Vuk Ratkovic, who was being prosecuted in a parallel trial in Sarajevo, was terminated in April due to his death.

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