Croatian War of Independence

Zagreb County Court on Tuesday convicted Milan Martic, the former president of an unrecognised wartime Serb rebel statelet called the Republic of Serbian Krajina, and his military chief-of-staff, Milan Celeketic, of staging rocket attacks on Croatian cities in 1995.

Under the first-instance verdict, Martic was sentenced to seven years in prison and Celeketic to 20 years.

Petar Djukic, a former high-ranking Serb police officer in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, told the retrial of Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Tuesday and Wednesday that military volunteers who came to Bosanski Samac in Bosnia in April 1992 were brought by political parties and not by Serbian State Security, SDB.

"High Risk, Low Return" was the headline of an article that photojournalist Paul Jenks wrote for Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper in September 1991 about his experience of covering the war in Croatia.

The first year of the trial in Belgrade for the abduction and killing of 20 passengers from a train at Strpci station in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war in 1993 has heard testimony from relatives of the victims, other passengers, policemen, Bosnian Serb Army soldiers and the defendants themselves, as a fuller picture of the crime more than 26 years ago began to emerge.

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network on Wednesday published its updated and improved War Crimes Verdicts Map, enabling users to search rulings in cases from courts across the former Yugoslavia and from the UN tribunal in The Hague.

Senior presidential, government and municipal officials, as well as representatives of war veterans, laid flowers on Friday in front of the monument dubbed 'Mother's Broken Wing' in central Skopje in memory of the 54 young Macedonians who lost their lives amid the collapse of the federal Yugoslav state.

The Humanitarian Law Centre NGO said in a report published on Wednesday that in the summer of 1995, the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs forcibly mobilised around 10,000 refugees and took them back to territories under the control of the Bosnian Serb Army in Bosnia and the rebel Serb-run Army of the Republic of Serbian Krajina in Croatia.

A day after Zagreb State Attorney's Office dismissed criminal complaints filed by war veterans against Milorad Pupovac, which claimed that the Croatian Serb leader had damaged the country's reputation, the leader of a disabled war veterans' association said on Tuesday that they will now try to make Chief State Attorney Drazen Jelenic step down from his position.

The identification of the remains of the 13 Serbs, which was organised by the Croatian War Veterans Ministry, was completed on Monday at the forensic department of the Zagreb University School of Medicine.

The county court in the Croatian city of Varazdin on Friday rejected a request for the early release of former Serbian paramilitary commander Dragan Vasiljkovic, widely known as Captain Dragan.

Vasiljkovic applied for conditional release because he has served two-thirds of his sentence.