THE HAGUE: A UN tribunal yesterday acquitted late Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic’s intelligence chief and his deputy of running Bosnian death squads during ex-Yugoslavia’s brutal 1990s conflict, saying they could not have known the units would commit such crimes.
“The Chamber found that the prosecution had not proven beyond reasonable doubt that the accused planned or ordered the crimes charged in the indictment,” Dutch judge Alphons Orie told the Yugoslav war crimes court, ordering their immediate release.
The release of intelligence chief Jovica Stanisic, 62, and co-accused Franko Simatovic, 63, is the latest in a string of acquittals by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Stanisic and key aide Simatovic each faced five counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for their roles in the war that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, which killed 100,000 people and left some 2.2 million others without a home.
Prosecutors accused the two of organising, financing and supplying Serb paramilitary groups that attacked towns across Croatia and Bosnia, killing Croats, Muslims and other non-Serbs to force them from large areas in Croatia and Bosnia to create a Serb-run state.
AFP
