JESUA ABINUN TESTIFIES IN TRIAL OF DINKO SAKIC

ZAGREB, April 21 (Hina) - Jesua Abinun, aged 78, from Split, on Wednesday testified before the Zagreb County Court in the trial of Dinko Sakic, a commander of the Jasenovac concentration camp. Abinun is the 16th witness in the trial of Dinko Sakic, who is accused of war crimes against humanity. Abinun was arrested with his father and brother in Sarajevo in October 1941, after which he was taken to the Jasenovac camp. He left the camp in a prisoners' breakthrough on April 22, 1945. Abinun also spent several months at the Stara Gradiska camp, where his mother and two sisters were killed. The witness said he remembered seeing Sakic at five or six musters in May, June and July of 1944. The sick, weak and unfit for work were selected during those musters, he said. He could not recall whether Sakic, who was said to be the camp commander and to have personally shot Dr Mile Boskovic dead, personally selected inmates. Abinun said he attended musters at which weak inmates were selected and then taken to Gradina, on the other bank of the Sava River, where they were executed. "They (the executions) were carried out, because carriages with new prisoners were constantly arriving", he said, adding the musters were particularly traumatic and that he tried to avoid them because "you could never tell if you were going to be called up and executed". Abinun said he had been called up one time. "My feet went numb and I did not respond. That saved me because some 20 inmates they called up that time were executed later. I think Sakic remembers that muster as well", he said, adding the selections were carried out by Ustashi officials. He personally did not attend any musters during which prisoners were killed. In early April 1945, the Ustashi started destroying the camp "to hide the traces and the witnesses to the crimes". Abinun said executions took place every day during that period. Until the last day, carriages with prisoners were arriving at the camp every day and many of the prisoners would be killed without entering the camp. The day before the breakthrough, a group of inmates was transferred to the women's section of the camp, which had been emptied of its inmates, who had been taken for execution. "Since they could not kill both us and the women on the same day for technical reasons, we were left for the next day, but we decided on a breakthrough. I was one among some 70 lucky ones who survived the breakthrough", he said, adding tomorrow was the anniversary of his liberation. After the breakthrough, Abinun was hiding in the woods for two days, after which he was found by the partisans and taken to a hospital in Lipik. "I weighed 48 kg when I left the camp", he said, adding his brother was killed while trying to escape from the tannery in the Jasenovac village. Recalling his imprisonment at Stara Gradiska, Abinun spoke about the execution of some 50 inmates, who were killed because one of the prisoners had escaped. This was the only execution which he witnessed during almost four years of his imprisonment. Abinun said he knew about the case when a group of Croats were imprisoned in the "K" unit's basement and starved to death. He remembered seeing a large number of men, women and children from Kozara (a mountain in north-west Bosnia-Herzegovina) arrive at the camp. He heard that the children were separated from the adults and poisoned with Zyklon-B. Of the Ustashi officers at the camp, the witness could remember Ljubo Milos, Maks Luburic, Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, and Hinko Dominik Picili, who was said to have designed the camp's incinerator. Regardless of who its commander was, the situation and conditions at the camp never changed. "We always worked until we were completely exhausted. People were taken there to be executed", Abinun said. (hina) jn rml