Special Operations Unit

The UN court in The Hague is delivering its final verdict on Wednesday in the war crimes retrial of top Serbian State Security officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic, who have appealed against their 12-year sentences for involvement in wartime crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The UN's International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague announced on Tuesday that the verdict on Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic's appeal against their conviction for war crimes in Bosnia will be handed down on May 31.

Franko Simatovic (right) and Jovica Stanisic in court in June 2017. Photo: EPA/Michael Kooren/Reuters pool.

The prosecution will then present its own appeal against the verdict on Wednesday, urging the UN court to convict the defendants of other wartime crimes of which they were initially acquitted and impose longer sentences.

Dangerous Territory

"The commander ordered that the Communication Centre will no longer receive calls," said a note entered at 5.10pm on November 9, 2001 in the daily log of the Communication Centre in Kula, the headquarters of Serbia's State Security Special Operations Unit, the JSO.

Belgrade Higher Court told BIRN that Zvezdan Jovanovic, who shot dead Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003, is not eligible to ask for conditional release from prison until the end of 2029, despite a campaign calling for him to be freed immediately as a 'Serbian hero'.

"Milosevic's men on the ground" was the most common description of these two leading Serbian state security officials - Jovica Stanisic, chief of the interior ministry's State Security Service and his right-hand man, Franko 'Frenki' Simatovic, commander of the service's Special Operations Unit.

The third and final day of closing arguments in the retrial of former Serbian State Security officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko 'Frenki' Simatovic at the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Wednesday saw disputes between prosecution and defence over incidents from the 1990s.

Looking back almost 20 years later, veteran journalist Milos Vasic told BIRN in an interview that the incident should have been recognised at the time as the "next step" in a chain of events that ultimately led to the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic on March 12, 2003.

Belgrade Appeals Court has confirmed a verdict sentencing Nikola Vida Lujic, a former member of the Special Operations Unit, an elite Serbian special forces unit also known as the Red Berets, to eight years in prison for raping a Bosnian women in Brcko on June 20, 1992.