Prosecutor Prashanthi Mahindaratne described it as an attempt to cover up soldiers' crimes and to intentionally create the wrong impression about who committed war crimes against local Serbs.
Disputing this, a defence witness for General Ante Gotovina, Ivan Galovic, told the UN tribunal in The Hague that he did not know whether some perpetrators were active soldiers, and if they were at the time of the crime, they were later demobilised and treated as civilians during criminal proceedings.
"If a perpetrator was a soldier at the time of the perpetration of the felony, and if he was demobilised before criminal proceedings were launched, their case was within the remit of a civilian court," said the witness, the Zadar County prosecutor.
Generals Gotovina, Ivan Cermak and Mladen Markac are charged according to their criminal responsibility with war crimes Croatian soldiers committed during the August 1995 Operation Storm, when Croatian forces retook central and southern Croatian areas from Serb rebels.
According to a report by the Zadar County Prosecutor's Office, since the end of the operation until February 1996, charges were pressed against 1,219 people for various types of felonies such as plunder, arson or rape. There were 13 charges for the killing of civilians in Serb-populated villages.
Testifying on Thursday, Galovic explained that criminal proceedings referred to civilians, while soldiers were within the remit of a military court.
He said that he had never received charges pressed against any Croatian special police officer.