After 17 Years of Investigation, No Charges Yet in Bosnian War Case

A criminal complaint about the murders of the four prisoners of war and two civilians was filed in 1998, and an investigation was opened seven years later, targeting three members of the People's Defence force of the Autonomous Province of Western Bosnia, a separatist statelet that existed during the war between 1993 and 1995 with its 'capital' in Velika Kladusa. The probe of a fourth person was halted because the suspect died.

The investigation was led for seven years by the prosecutor's office of the Una-Sana Canton in Bihac in north-west Bosnia, then for the following seven years, it was led by the state prosecutor's office in the capital Sarajevo.

The probe was then sent back to the Una-Sana cantonal prosecution in 2019 for another two years. But no indictment was raised against the suspects, and in December 2021, the Bosnian state court decided to return the investigation to the state prosecutor's office in Sarajevo because of the "complexity" of the case.

Senita Abdic, the daughter of one of the victims, Huso Cehic, said that police and autopsy documents show that her father and his fellow soldiers Fikret and Izet Salkic were beaten and tortured for several days before being shot in the head.

"Their arms and legs were broken, they had injuries from a rifle butt on their heads. After that, they were taken from the command post to a field and two shots were fired from a gun into their heads," Abdic said.

According to the criminal complaint from 1998, after they were captured along with a large number of others, they were taken to the Pasin Potok area in Croatia, where their uniforms, watches, money and other valuables were confiscated.

They were then transferred to Maljevac in Croatia, locked in a garage and brutally...