Addressing the special war crimes tribunal in Belgrade, Vasiljevic said that he had first heard of the Ovcara massacre in January 1993, and stressed that no mention of the crime had been made in any official report of the JNA at the time.
The witness said that JNA documents or the final report compiled by Veselin Sljivancanin after the fall of Vukovar into the hands of Serb rebels supported by the JNA made no mention of Ovcara. There was nothing about the transfer of prisoners of war by JNA officers to the then so-called Territorial Defence units in Vukovar.
Veselin Sljivancanin, Mile Mrksic and Milan Radic are the notorious Vukovar Troika accused by the UN war crimes tribunal of crimes in that eastern Croatian town.
Vasiljevic spoke in detail about what he had heard of Ovcara. The commander of the then special Serbian troops, Muris Zjajo, was the first to tell Vasiljevic about the crime, and he also told him that members of the Territorial Defence had committed the massacre.
According to Vasiljevic's testimony, he met Mile Mrksic in a Belgrade market in 1998 and told him that "(President Slobodan) Milosevic has gone mad and is going to arrest all of us and send to The Hague".
Mrksic also told him, swearing on his children, that "if they (the army) had known what would happen, they would never have handed over POWs to the Territorial Defence units".
Vasiljevic added that he had then asked Mrksic why they had not informed their superiors of the crime after they had heard of it. Mrskic responded that "when we saw what they had done to them, we vowed to keep silent," Vasiljevic told the court.
The trial will resume on Thursday when the indictees will cross-examine the witness Vasiljevic.