"I am guilty, Your Honour," Ivica Rajic said at the International Criminial Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague after Presiding Judge Liu Daqun read each of the four counts of the indictment.
Rajic said he was aware of the consequences arising from the guilty plea, including the fact that the trial chamber was not bound by the agreement between the prosecution and the defence on the length of the sentence, and added that he expected "a fair punishment".
Under the agreement with the prosecutors, Rajic pleaded guilty to wilful killing, inhumane treatment, including sexual abuse, seizure of property and large-scale destruction not justified by military necessity, which qualify as grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva conventions.
The prosecution dismissed five counts of the indictment charging him with murder, cruel treatment and looting as violations of the laws and customs of war, and one count charging him with unlawful detention of civilians as a grave breach of the Geneva conventions in return for a single combined prison sentence of 12 to 15 years' imprisonment.
Under the plea agreement, Rajic agreed to "full and substantial cooperation with the prosecutor," which, according to Prosecutor Kenneth Scott, meant giving true testimony in some other cases.
Rajic, 47, former commander of the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) Second Operational Group in Central Bosnia, was initially charged with 10 counts of violations of the laws and customs of war and grave breaches of the Geneva conventions committed during an attack on the village of Stupni Do near Vares on 23 October 1993. He was also charged with the detention and ill-treatment of 250 Muslim civilians and soldiers in Vares.
Rajic was indicted in 1995 and was arrested in the southern Croatian Adriatic city of Split on 5 April 2003. He was transferred to the ICTY detention unit in the Hague district of Scheveningen on 24 June 2003.
At the end of the hearing on Wednesday, Rajic asked the trial chamber not to send documents from his case file to his former defence counsel Zeljko Olujic anymore for fear they would end up "in wrong hands, with people who are working against me and against the interests of justice and of this court, and in somebody else's interests."
Rajic said he did not want Olujic to represent him anymore, accusing the lawyer of "deliberately obstructing his defence and his intention to cooperate with the prosecution in establishing the truth."