ZAGREB, April 28 (Hina) - The presentation of evidence in the trial of six men accused of war crimes in eastern Croatia began before the Special War Crimes Court in Belgrade on Wednesday.
ZAGREB, April 28 (Hina) - The presentation of evidence in the trial of
six men accused of war crimes in eastern Croatia began before the
Special War Crimes Court in Belgrade on Wednesday.#L#
At the beginning of this part of the trial, six witnesses, who lived
in the eastern Croatian city of Vukovar in 1991 when war crimes were
perpetrated, gave their testimonies on Wednesday. They confirmed that
at the start of the war in Croatia they had been drafted and that they
knew the indictees.
Witness, Dragan Dulic, who voluntarily joined the Serb Territorial
Defence, said he only knew the second defendant, Stanko Vujanovic, by
sight.
All the witnesses said that they had not known about the killing of
civilians at the Ovcara farm in mid-November 1991, but that they heard
rumours about it a month or two later.
They said that the Serb Territorial Defence of Vukovar was so only in
name and that it was not a proper military formation. The witnesses,
however, admitted that the Territorial Defence had functioned as a
part of the the then Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and that it received
orders from JNA officers Mile Mrksic and Veselin Sljivancanin.
Present at the trial on Wednesday were members of nongovernmental
organisations, lawyers Cedo Prodanovic and Goran Mikulicic in their
capacity as representatives of the Croatian Government, and officials
from the Croatian Embassy in Belgrade. Several Belgrade lawyers
attended the trial as legal counsel for 53 families from Croatia whose
members were killed at Ovcara,
(Hina) ms sb