Bosnian Serb Army

Ratko Mladic's defence asked the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Tuesday to postpone the final verdict in the former Bosnian Serb Army commander's trial because lead counsel Branko Lukic cannot be present in court due to illness.

Twenty-six years ago, a shell fired from positions held by the Bosnian Serb Army hit the Kapija area of Tuzla in central Bosnia and Herzegovina, killing 71 people and injuring over 200 more.

Most of the casualties on May 25, 1995 were young people; the youngest was a two-and-a-half-year-old boy called Sandro Kalesic.

Radovan Karadzic's lawyer Peter Robinson told BIRN on Friday that the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague has not agreed to the wartime Bosnian Serb political leader's demand to serve his sentence in a country other than Britain, where he feels his life could be in danger.

Belgrade Higher Court sentenced Dalibor Krstovic to nine years in prison on Thursday for raping a female Bosniak prisoner while she was being detained at an elementary school in the town of Kalinovik during the war in August 1992.

Judge Zorana Trajkovic said that victim was captured with her two children, aged seven and nine, and that she was a "civilian in a helpless position".

Former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic's defence has submitted a challenge to the decision on Tuesday by the UN court in The Hague to transfer him to a prison in Britain to serve his life sentence for genocide and other wartime crimes, claiming he could become the target for a potentially deadly attack by other prisoners.

The Bosnian state court found ex-policeman Simo Stupar guilty on Tuesday of participating in a widespread and systematic attack on the Bosniak population in the Vlasenica area from April 1992 to the end of September that year, involving murders, the abuse of civilians and forcible disappearances.

The final verdict in the trial of Ratko Mladic, aged 79, is scheduled for 3 pm on Tuesday, June 8, and will be handed down by judges Prisca Matima Nyambe, Aminatta Lois Runeni N'gum, Seymour Panton, Elizabeth Ibanda-Nahamya and newly appointed judge Mustapha El Baaj.

This year's commemoration of the April 30 1992 Brcko bridge massacre was organised by the Association of Families of the Missing, Forcibly Taken away and Killed Bosniaks of Brcko District of BiH and the Association of Families of the Missing, Forcibly Taken away and Killed Croats in collaboration with associations for helping victims and survivors of sexual violence and detainees.

The commission was founded as an attempt to "offer a more balanced depiction of the events in Sarajevo based on facts", the report says. It was chaired by Israeli historian and writer Raphael Israeli, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Retired general Jovan Divjak has died after a prolonged illness at the age of 84, Education Builds Bosnia, the NGO he established, announced in a statement.Born on March 11, 1937, in Belgrade, he graduated from the Military Academy, the Command and Staff Academy and the War School. He later graduated also from the French Army Staff School.