Srebrenica Seven trial hears chilling testimony

Srebrenica Seven trial hears chilling testimony

The witness was a soldier in a logistics unit of the Bosnian Serb Army (VRS) Zvornik Brigade, stationed in the Karakaj barracks near Zvornik. He was driving a van delivering supplies for the troops.

He says he was "a Jack of all trades”, constantly on the move. Doing the rounds of the area in July 1995, he had the opportunity to see buses loaded with Bosniak men at several more locations around Zvornik. He was told they had been brought there fore an exchange of prisoners.

According to his testimony, several days after the fall of Srebrenica hewas ordered to take the van and deliver bread, water and juice to a school in Orahovac, some 5 to 6 kilometers from Zvornik.

The school gym was full of captured Bosniak men, he said, and the school building was surrounded by Serbian soldiers and military police. With them were two officers, Sreten Milošević, assistant commander for logistics, and Drago Nikolić, one of the accused, who was the security chief in the Zvornik Brigade.

Nikolić was considered to be a "decent and pedantic" officer, the witness said, not "arrogant" He was very "successful" in his task as the coordinator of prisoner exchanges.

He was there when about 25 captured Bosniak men were taken out of the gym blindfolded and with hands tied behind their backs and loaded onto trucks. The witness did not hear who and when had issued the order for the prisoners to be put on the trucks and transferred to a place where, as it later transpired, they would be executed by a firing squad.

The witness told the court he was ordered to follow the truck in his van. At the execution site located near the train tracks, he witnessed something that "silenced the firing squad".

The Bosniak prisoners were brought there in groups and shot to death and this process lasted the whole day, the protected witness said. Suddenly a figure of a boy, five or six years old, rose from the pile of dead bodies. The witness described how the sight of the boy walking towards the firing squad left the soldiers dumbstruck and made them drop their weapons.

The boy was covered in blood and confused. An officer, described by the witness as a tall man with a moustache, a lieutenant-colonel or a colonel, turned to the frozen soldiers and said, "What are you waiting for? Finish him off". When the soldiers refused to do so, the order was given for the boy to be shot "with the next batch of prisoners".

The witness offered to take the scared boy with him. Instead of taking him back to the school in Orahovac, he took him to the hospital in Zvornik where the boy was given medical treatment.

The court heard about the fate of the “lucky child”, as the witness called him, in closed session. Most of the cross-examination by Drago Nikolić’s defense was also conducted in closed session.