Serb Fighters’ Indictment Details Strpci Train Massacre Plot

On February 27, 1993, Nail Kajevic waited in the southern Serbian town of Prijepolje for his brother Nijazim to arrive by train from Belgrade. But when the train arrived after some delay, his brother was not on it and the other passengers had a gruesome story to tell.

The train had been stopped at a small station in the Bosnian town of Strpci, near the Bosnia-Serbia border, and uniformed men took several passengers away in an unknown direction.

"Out of the 20 who were taken, nine were from Prijepolje, so the families found out right away," Nail Kajevic told BIRN.

The 20 non-Serb passengers were taken and killed by members of a Serb paramilitary unit called the Avengers, which was under the command of Milan Lukic.

Among the victims were 18 Bosniaks, one Croat and one unidentified person. The remains of only four of them have been found, while the others are still listed as missing.

Only two Bosnian Serb fighters have so far have been convicted of the crime -Nebojsa Ranisavljevic, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison in Montenegro, and Mico Jovicic, who received a five-year sentence after pleading guilty before the Bosnian state court.

The Avengers' leader Milan Lukic was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Hague Tribunal in 2012 for committing war crimes in the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad, but not for the Strpci deaths.

The trial of ten suspects began in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo in October 2015 after their arrests in December the previous year.

In Belgrade, the trial of five more suspects officially began on January 29 this year, only to be postponed because one of the defendants was ill. The postponed opening hearing was rescheduled for March 4, but it remains uncertain if it will be held or not.