The Lora trial will be held with four defendants being tried in absentia, because the panel has decided that the other four defendants, who are now in custody, cannot wait indefinitely for the arrest or surrender of the four fugitives, Judge Scepanovic said, adding that the request submitted by detained defendants Davor Banic and Ante Gudic was fully justified.
She could not say when the trial would commence.
Corroborating their request for the start of the trial, defence attorneys for Banic and Gudic said that the Croatian criminal law provided for trials in absence if defendants had been on the run for a longer period of time. This is the case with the first defendant in the Lora case, Tomislav Duic, and Miljenko Bajic and Josip Bikic, who were on the run during the first trial in this case in 2002. At the time, the Split County Court acquitted all the eight defendants, but the ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court. Besides, Duic, Bajic, Bikic and Emilio Bungur have been in hiding since early November 2004, when the police started arresting the defendants for their retrial.
The panel of judges today overruled a request by the detainees for the separation of the proceedings, saying that there were no grounds for separate trials because the defendants "are interrelated in the indictment".
The indictment alleges that the eight former military policemen committed war crimes against Serb civilians at the Lora military investigation centre in the southern Adriatic city of Split in 1992.