Serbia's war crimes court on Tuesday jailed four former "Scorpions" paramilitaries for up to 20 years after they were filmed taking part in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Muslims.
It was the first case in Serbia to deal with the notorious massacre in which 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed.
In announcing the verdict on the charge of killing six Muslims, Judge Gordana Bozilovic-Petrovic said the four paramilitaries were guilty of war crimes against a civilian population. "By committing such acts against defenseless civilians, by showing off their power and showing no remorse, the defendants gave the court no option for milder sentences," said the judge.
The longest sentences of 20 years were given to former "Scorpions" commander Slobodan Medic and his main accomplice, Branislav Medic.
"(Slobodan) Medic ordered the three defendants and two others to execute the prisoners, take them away from the site and make it seem as if they had been killed in conflict," the judge said.
The only defendant to have confessed, Pera Petrasevic, was jailed for 13 years. Another accomplice, Aleksandar Medic, was given five years. A fifth defendant, Aleksandar Vukov, was cleared due to a lack of evidence, while two other former militiamen were separately tried on the same charges.
The massacre of Muslims in the UN-protected Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica is considered the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.
The five were charged after the release of a chilling video showing six Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica being shot dead in the village of Trnovo in July 1995. In the footage, the Scorpions were seen taunting four Muslims, whose hands had been tied behind their backs. They forced the four to lie face-down in a roadside ditch before shooting them in the back.
The remains of five Trnovo murder victims were exhumed in April 1999. Three were identified by DNA analysis as Safet Fejzic, Azmir Alispahic, and Sidik Salkic. The others were later named as Smail Ibrahimovic, Jusa Delic and Dino Salihovic.
Hana Fezlic, a Bosnian Muslim who lost children during the Srebrenica massacre, said "Serbia should be ashamed" of its legal system.
Human rights activist Natasa Kandic, whose organization obtained the video and handed it over to the UN court, also criticized the verdict. "The verdict neither brings justice to the defendants for what they have done, nor for the victims killed only because they were Bosnian (Muslims) from Srebrenica," said Kandic.
The verdict was slammed as "a political sentence" in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo. "Criminals were again awarded and victims were further victimized," Munira Subasic, the head of an association of mothers of massacre victims, said.
The video of the shootings was shown in June 2005 during the war crimes trial of late Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which is based in The Hague. The images shocked many Serbs who had questioned whether the Srebrenica massacre had really taken place.
The two men most wanted over Srebrenica - wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic - remain at large more than 11 years since the ICTY indicted them for genocide in relation to the massacre.
Source: Aljazeera
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