Franko Simatović

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.

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.

Defence lawyers for former Serbian security service officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic told the Hague court that notorious paramilitary leader Arkan’s fighters operated as part of the Bosnian Serb police in 1995.

A witness told the trial of former Serbian security officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic that he saw Zeljko Raznatovic, alias Arkan, shoot a captive dead in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995.

A witness told the Hague retrial of former Serbian security service chiefs Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic how he survived a shooting by paramilitaries led by Serbian warlord Arkan in Bosnia in 1995.