As a result, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) had to order authorities of the Croat Muslim Federation to cooperate with the attorneys.
The Sarajevo-based 'Dnevni Avaz' daily on Monday reported that a trial chamber of the ICTY issued an order on 6 July instructing the federal authorities to enable Halilovic's defence counsel to have access to all available documentation.
The request pertains to the archives of the former Federal Intelligence Service known as FOSS, which was actually a secret service of the Bosnian Muslim side after the war in Bosnia. The documentation is believed to be now possessed by the Intelligence and Security Agency of Bosnia-Herzegovina known as OSA which took over powers from the two entities' secret agencies this spring.
OSA head Almir Dzuvo wrote to the tribunal that the agency would fulfill all the requests but it is still not known whether this was done by 30 July, a deadline set up by the tribunal.
The Hague-based tribunal accuses Gen. Halilovic of being responsible for the killing of Croat civilians and soldiers, who were a part of the Croat Defence Council (HVO), in southern villages of Grabovica and Uzdol in 1993 when he was the Bosnian Army chief commander.
Before departing for The Hague, Gen, Halilovic asserted that he bore no responsibility for the Grabovica and Uzdol massacres as the chain of the command was firmly in the hands of the then political leadership in Sarajevo and General Rasim Delic. Halilovic went on to say that nobody in Sarajevo showed any interest to investigate the crimes committed against Croats in the two villages.
Regarding the case of Naser Oric who commanded Muslim units in Srebrenica, which was one of few remaining Muslim enclaves in east Bosnia during the war, a part of the media treat him as 'the sacrificial lamb'. Local authorities in Tuzla Canton seem to be accountable for the obstruction of his defence.
According to the Dnevni Avaz, Oric's lawyers want to gain an insight in documents covering 1992 and 1993 in order to explain warnings which were at the time sent to Tuzla from Srebrenica, that was under the siege of Serb units.
Despite all efforts which they made to find relevant documents, the lawyers only found a book of protocol from the said period in the archives of the Tuzla Canton.