Transporting corpses was “state interest”

Transporting corpses was “state interest”

In April or early May 1999, Protić said, Dragan Nenadić ordered him to “get a hold of a truck” and to report to General Petar Zeković, head of the General Services Directorate in the Serbian MUP.

Nenadić, chief of the MUP garage where Protić worked, then told him he was to do "a task that was very important and in the interest of the state". The witness borrowed a truck from a friend and reported to Zeković.

He told Protić to go to Tekija to pick up the corpses from a refrigerated truck that the local police had found in the Danube. Fifty four corpses were loaded on his truck that time. He told the court he drove them to Batajnica on Zeković's order.

According to the evidence given byČaslav Golubović, former chief of Kladovo police, and Bosko Radojković, a police officer there, their driver had already taken 30 corpses to Belgrade before Protić’s arrival.

Golubović and Radojković claimed that they had transported the corpses and blown up the refrigerated truck in the Petrovo Selo area on the orders of Vlastimir Đorđević, who was the chief of the Public Security Department at the time.

Đorđević is now a fugitive from the international justice.

After he moved the corpses from Tekija to Batajnica, Protić drove the truck three more times “in the interest of the state”.

First he moved some 20 corpses to Petrovo Selo near Kladovo from the village of Janjevo in Kosovo. A couple of days later he transported another 55 or 56 corpses from southern Kosovska Mitrovica to the same destination.

He testified about unloading them about 50 meters away from the pit where bodies he had brought there earlier had been buried. On one of those occasions, he saw the destroyed refrigerated truck from Tekija in a meadow near Petrovo Selo.

And then, he said, he drove “a largest reefer there was” full of corpses from the parking lot of the Rilindija newspaper in Priština to the Special Antiterrorist Unit (SAJ) center in Batajnica near Belgrade.

In a statement he gave to a Serbian investigating judge and a war crimes prosecutor, Protić said that he had been given the order to take over and unload the bodies by General Zečević on all four occasions.

As he testified at the Hague Friday, he amended those claims. He said General Sreten Lukić, who was chief of the Interior Ministry Staff in Kosovo, gave him further instructions by phone on two occasions, when he was transferring the corpses from Janjevo and Kosovska Mitrovica to Petrovo Selo.

In his cross-examination, the defense counsel of the accused police general contested this statement accusing the witness of speaking against Lukić only because "he refused to grant him a flat illegally."

The witness admitted to asking Lukić to do that, because he could not live in Batajnica after all that had happened. He repeated that he was "99.9 percent sure” that he had heard Lukić's voice over the phone".

When the defense counsel asked why he failed to mention that to the Serb judicial bodies, the witness said that he kept silent because he feared for the lives of his wife, daughter and son who all worked in the Interior Ministry. At the time his statement was taken, Lukić was the Chief of the Public Security Department.

The trial of Milan Milutinović, Nikola Šainović, Dragoljub Ojdanić, Nebojša Pavković, Vladimir Lazarević and Sreten Lukić continues on Monday with testimony from military prosecutor Lakić Đorović.