Bosnian War

The Bosnian state prosecution filed an indictment on Wednesday charging Predrag Bastah with crimes against humanity for his alleged participation in the murders of 37 Bosniak civilians at Mracni Dol in the Vlasenica municipality.

On that same day in Traktorska Street in Sijekovac, a village near the northern Bosnian town of Bosanski Brod, where Milosevic still lives, soldiers and members of paramilitary groups, some of which consisted of locals Croats and Bosniaks, killed his father Luka and two brothers, Zeljko and Dragan, who was 17. Zeljko's body has never been found.

In closing arguments at the Bosnian state court on Thursday, the prosecution asked for Mile Pazin and Vide Kresic to be found guilty of crimes against civilian prisoners in the Stolac area in 1993.

"The prosecution considers that it has proved beyond doubt that the defendants committed the crimes that they are charged with in this case," said Bosnian state prosecutor Igor Dubak.

Serbia's war crimes prosecutor said in his closing statement to Belgrade Higher Court on Thursday that all the evidence showed that Husein Mujanovic was guilty of abusing Serbs held at a wartime prison that he commanded in Hrasnica.

Prosecutor Mioljub Vitorovic said the evidence "indisputably established that Husein Mujanovic committed the criminal act with which he is charged".

BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina was given the European Press Prize Special Award for 2020 on Thursday for its groundbreaking work in covering transitional justice topics.

Graves of Srebrenica victims. Archive photo: Wikimedia Commons/Michael Buker.

It said that the remains are believed to be those of victims of the massacres of some 8,000 Bosniak man and boys by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995, which international courts have classified as genocide.

Ratko Mladic's defence team told BIRN on Wednesday that the former Bosnian Serb Army commander, who is appealing against his conviction for genocide and other wartime crimes, should be hospitalised immediately in The Hague because his health condition is now "disastrous".

The Bosnian state court on Tuesday convicted three Bosnian Serb Army ex-soldiers, Branko Cigoja, Zeljko Todic and Sasa Boskic, of committing crimes against civilians in the village of Oborci Donji Vakuf municipality on September 13, 1995.

Former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and the wartime commander of the Bosnian Serb Army's Sarajevo-Romanija Corps, Stanislav Galic, have both been convicted by the Hague Tribunal of having command responsibility for the attack, but none of the direct perpetrators of the shelling have faced justice yet.

The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague said on Thursday that it has postponed next month's appeals hearings in the Ratko Mladic case because of travel restrictions imposed due to the coronavirus pandemic.