Four Bosnian Serb soldiers guilty of Srebrenica killings

Bosnia’s war crimes court has convicted four former Bosnian Serb soldiers of participating in the execution of hundreds of Srebrenica Muslims during the country’s 1992-95 conflict and sentenced them to a total of 142 years in prison.

About 800 captured Muslim Bosniaks were shot and killed at Branjevo military farm, near Srebrenica.

It was one of several sites where more than 8,000 such victims were killed in what became known as the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and a major development in the Bosnia war. UN secretary-general Kofi Annan called the mass murders the worst crime on European soil since the Second World War.

The four former members of the Bosnian Serb Army’s elite Tenth Sabotage Detachment were convicted yesterday of crimes against humanity, but were acquitted on genocide charges when the court found it had not been proven they had “genocidal intent”. The court sentenced Franc Kos and Zoran Goronja to 40 years in jail, Stanko Kojic to 43, and Vlastimir Golijan to 19.

The sentences are the harshest given so far by Bosnia’s war crimes court for the massacre.

Judge Mira Smajlovic said the killings at Branjevo farm took five hours, during which time the soldiers involved found time for a lunch break.

“Their attitude toward the killings can be best understood when one knows they even took a break to have lunch and drink beer in the meadow full of corpses, while other prisoners looked on from the buses,” waiting for their turn to be murdered, Smajlovic said.The judge said the four soldiers carried out the crime in “an organised and systematic” manner.