Reign of Terror: Arkan’s Tigers and the Start of the Bosnian War

Dzenita Mulabdic and her husband Muhamed were living a contented life in the north-eastern Bosnian city of Bijeljina in 1992, looking forward to arrival of a new baby. Their son Adnan was two-and-a-half and Dzenita was pregnant again.

Mulabdic remembers the exact moment when things changed for them after hearing Muhamed's father said he could sense a strange atmosphere in the city and told them to "go home as soon as possible".

Walking through the town, they heard gunshots. "I felt that my Muhamed was very nervous, but we remained at the apartment. Everything was normal except that we heard the occasional gunshot," Mulabdic said.

At the start of April 1992, they moved to her husband's parents' house. During the call to prayer from a nearby mosque on April 2, soldiers knocked on their door and the door of their neighbours Redzep and Tifa Sabanovic. As they were coming out of the house, Mulabdic said that the Sabanovics' son Admir walked out in front of her.

"They hit him with a rifle butt and took him away. When I walked down the hall, I saw a puddle of blood. I automatically went to their entrance, and when I looked around, I saw Redzep lying face-down on the right, his head all covered with blood. Tifa wanted to go to him, but at that moment there was a burst of gunfire from the mosque across the street," she said.

Mulabdic expected the soldiers to shoot her too, but they sent her back inside when she said she was pregnant.

"I entered the house and saw it was full of soldiers. They had no masks, so it could be seen clearly that they were Arkan's men," she recalled.

The Serb fighters - Arkan's men, members of notorious Serbian criminal Zeljko 'Arkan' Raznatovic's paramilitary unit - let her and her husband go...