Milan Martić

Ivica Bilaver was a 13-year-old schoolboy in the autumn of 1991, when his home village of Skabrnja, near the Croatian city of Zadar, became the focus of fighting between Croatian forces and the Yugoslav People's Army and other Serbian fighters.

Fighting units under the ultimate command of Serbian state security officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic "controlled the situation on the ground" in Serb-controlled parts of Croatia and, to a lesser extent, Bosnia during the wars of the 1990s, veteran Serbian journalist Filip Svarm told BIRN ahead of the verdict in the pair's war crimes trial in The Hague.

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.

Witness Dejan Lucic told the retrial of Serbian State Security Service officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Thursday that the defendants did not send Dragan Vasiljkovic, alias Captain Dragan, to Croatia in 1991 to set up a training camp for rebel Serb fighters.

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 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 State Attorney's Office in Split said on Thursday that it will begin an investigation into an unnamed 72-year-old Serbian citizen accused of crimes against prisoners during the war in 1992 and 1993.

Croatia’s Supreme Court reduced the sentence handed down to former Serbian paramilitary commander Dragan Vasiljkovic, alias Captain Dragan, from 15 to 13-and-a-half years in prison for war crimes in Croatia in 1991.

Testifying at the Hague trial of former Serbian State Security chiefs Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic, a Serbian ex-policeman admitted personally setting houses on fire in a Bosniak village in 1993.