Jovica Stanišić

A retired Serbian State Security Service officer told the retrial of Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Wednesday that he met the defendants in November 1994 on Petrova Gora mountain in Croatia, which at that time was part of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina established by rebel Croatian Serbs.

A defence witness at former Serbian Security Service officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic's retrial said he knew Serbian paramilitary units were operating in Croatia in 1991 but didn't know about crimes they committed.

Defence witness Nebojsa Bogunovic, who was a police official in the Serbian town of Backa Palanka, told the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Wednesday that he volunteered to go to the Eastern Slavonia region of Croatia in the summer of 1991 as the conflict there was developing.

A protected witness told the retrial of Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Wednesday that the Serbian State Security Service (SDB) was not involved in the so-called 'Log Revolution' that saw Serbs rebel against the Croatian authorities in 1990.

A defence witness in the war crimes retrial of former Serbian state security officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic said on Tuesday that the State Security Service, SDB, that they led was not involved in establishing a training camp in a Serb breakaway statelet in Croatia in 1991.

The latest hearing in the case against Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic was held at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Tuesday, when the first defence witness in their retrial for wartime crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia gave testimony behind closed doors.

Lawyer Wayne Jordash told the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals as the trial resumed on Tuesday that the defence will call witnesses who will confirm that Jovica Stanisic, the former chief of the Serbian state security service, was not in command of Serbian paramilitary or police units in Bosnia or Croatia during the war, as the indictment claims.

Two out of six Bosniak men from Srebrenica who were shot by members of the Scorpions paramilitary unit in 1995 have now been identified after their remains exhumed from a mass grave at Rogoj mountain pass in the Trnovo municipality in June last year, it was announced on Friday.

One of the most respected journalists in Serbia, Dejan Anastasijevic, a longtime correspondent for Time magazine, Vreme, Tanjug, B92, the BBC and many others, has died in Belgrade after a long illness.

Born in 1962, Anastasijevic reported from the wars in the former Yugoslavia and wrote extensively about war crimes, earning the wrath of the Serbian authorities at the time.

The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals has extended the provisional release in Serbia for Jovica Stanisic – charged with committing crimes against non-Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia – until January 2019.