The witness, Bosnian army officer Ibrahim Saric, was arrested by members of the Croat Defence Council (HVO) in Mostar in July 1993 and sent to the College of Mechanical Engineering which had been converted into a prison.
Describing the living conditions in prison as disastrous, Saric said he had been detained there for three days together with 15 Bosnian Muslims aged between 40 and 50. He was then transferred to the Heliodrom prison where he spent another eight months in inhumane conditions. The witness said that prisoners in the Heliodrom prison had been tortured and killed and that some of them had been used by HVO soldiers as "human shields" on the front line.
Saric was not sure about the names of the commanders of the two prisons. In his testimony he did not explicitly mention any of the accused.
The accused -- Jadranko Prlic, Bruno Stojic, Slobodan Praljak, Milivoj Petkovic, Valentin Coric and Berislav Pusic -- are charged with war crimes against Muslims in central Bosnia and western Herzegovina.