Serb Volunteer Guard

For at least two years, officers at the Serbian Interior Ministry's State Security Service kept records thoroughly about their outgoing on personnel. About every two weeks, they made a list of all the people receiving per diem allowances and the total amount of money paid to them.

The Humanitarian Law Centre NGO published a dossier on Thursday about the crimes committed by the Serbian Volunteer Guard paramilitary unit, also known as Arkan's Tigers, and urged the authorities in Belgrade to prosecute any suspects who are still alive.

The prosecution urged the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Wednesday to convict Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic of participating in a joint criminal enterprise, along with other Serb political, military and police officials, aimed at forcibly removing non-Serbs from large areas of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during wartime.

"Milosevic's men on the ground" was the most common description of these two leading Serbian state security officials - Jovica Stanisic, chief of the interior ministry's State Security Service and his right-hand man, Franko 'Frenki' Simatovic, commander of the service's Special Operations Unit.

It has been three-and-a-half years since the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY in The Hague closed, and the successor institution, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals is now finalising its last trial.

Jovan Dimitrijevic, who was in charge of logistics for Arkan's paramilitary unit, told the retrial of Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague that weapons for the unit's wartime activities were supplied by the Yugoslav People's Army, not the Serbian State Security Service.

On January 15, 2000, Zeljko Raznatovic was having a drink with friends at the upmarket InterContinental Hotel in Belgrade when a man walked up to them and opened fire at close range with a semi-automatic pistol.

Raznatovic - better known around the world as the Serbian paramilitary leader Arkan - was hit by a bullet in the eye, and died on his way to hospital. He was 47.

The prosecution at the trial of Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Thursday used excerpts from Ratko Mladic's war diary in an attempt to prove that the Serbian State Security Service, where the defendants were senior officials, sent paramilitary units from Serbia to Bosnia and Herzegovina in autumn 1995 and had control over

Two former Serbian intelligence chiefs will go back on trial before U.N. judges on June 13, accused of running death squads which terrorized Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s Balkans wars.

Former Croatian prisoners of war were the first witnesses at the war crimes trial of the 1990s Serb paramilitary commander Dragan Vasiljkovic, better known as ‘Captain Dragan’.