During the war, Ljubicic was the commander of the fourth military police battalion of the Bosnian Croat Defence Council (HVO) and the indictment portrays him as the highest-ranking HVO officer in central Bosnia at the time when HVO units committed atrocities against local Muslims (Bosniaks) in the areas of Vitez and Busovaca.
After being on the run for several years, the indictee surrendered to the Hague-based UN tribunal in November 2001.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), that charges him with the 1993 massacre of Bosniaks in the village of Ahmici and torture of about hundred Bosniaks in HVO-run prisons in Vitez and Busovaca, decided to refer the Ljubicic case to the Bosnian judiciary in April last year. After that Ljubicic was transferred from the ICTY detention centre to the custody in Sarajevo.
Main hearing sessions are likely to take two months.
The prosecution has proposed the hearing of 56 witnesses with twenty of them to be protected by special measures.