Jovica Stanisic, a former head or the Serbian State Security Service (SDB), and Franko Simatovic, a former commander of the SDB special operations unit, are charged with murder, persecutions on political, racial and religious grounds, deportation and other war crimes committed in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the wars in the 1990s.
After the prosecution presented the evidence in the first part of their trial before the Hague-based UN war crimes tribunal, the defence teams for the two indictees recently submitted a motion for their acquittal.
Although they lodged a request for his release, defence lawyers for Stanisic said that they would not corroborate their request.
Presenting their stand last week, the defence team for Simatovic said that the prosecution failed to prove any connection between their client and the SDB units or Serb paramilitary units that had committed war crimes.
Contrary to the Simatovic defence team's claims, the prosecution has provided evidence for every count of the indictment, prosecutor Maxine Marcus, told the ICTY today.
The ICTY trial chamber in charge of this case said that it would deliver a decision on the defence teams' request on 5 May.
Today, the prosecutors recalled that their evidence included recordings of intercepted conversations and messages in writing confirming that Stanisic and Simatovic had participated in a joint criminal enterprise set up to cleanse large Croatian and Bosnian areas of non-Serbs from 1991 to 1995.
Apart from these two indictees, the criminal enterprise also includes the late Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic, and leaders of Bosnian and Croatian Serbs -- Ratko Mladic, Radovan Karadzic, Biljana Plavsic, Milan Martic, Goran Hadzic and Milan Babic -- as well as Serb Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj, and the late Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan, a commander of Serb paramilitary units.
For instance, a transcript of a conversation between Stanisic and Karadzic reveals that Stanisic was speaking about the extermination of Muslims and in one of his conversations with Hadzic, he was also speaking about the segregation of population along ethnic lines in areas which Serb rebels occupied in Croatia.
The indictment alleges, among other things that in or about April 1991, Stanisic and Simatovic helped to establish a training centre in Golubic, near Knin, when that area fell into the hands of Croatian Serb rebels who set up the Serb Autonomous Region (SAO) Krajina in Croatia.
According to the indictment, at this training centre, they organised, supplied, financed, supported and directed the training of “Serb Forces”. Additional training centres were subsequently established in Serb-held parts of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina and they were financed by the Serbian State Security Service . Volunteers and conscripts were trained at these centres, and some were subsequently deployed to the special units of the SDB or became instructors in other units affiliated with the SDB. These special units were secretly established by or with the assistance of the SDB from no later than April 1991 and continued throughout the indictment period for the purpose of undertaking special military actions in the Republic of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
According to the indictment, those units perpetrated war crimes in Dubica, Cerovljani, Bacin, Saborsko, Skabrnja, Bruska, Dalj and Erdut in Croatia during 1991 as well as in Bijeljina, Zvornik, Bosanski Samac, Doboj, Sanski Most and Srebrenica in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995.
The trial against those two Serb intelligence officers commenced on 28 April 2008 before the Hague-based UN tribunal.