Prosecution Witness Recalls Nahorevo Detention

Ismet Cormehmedic said that in the spring of 1992 there was shooting in the Sarajevo neighbourhood of Nahorevo, and so he moved, together with his family, to the house of his neighbour, Meho Muharemovic.

“We were there for several days. Someone constantly came to see us. It was nothing terrible, but we were afraid of the unknown. On the second day, Goran Saric came and told me I have to surrender all my weapons. Our family had a lot of weapons, because we were hunters. We heard that Saric was the police chief in Nahorevo. He also took my father’s car, said he needed it for something,” recalled Cormehmedic.

Several days later, he added, the Bosniak men from Nahorevo were called to a meeting in the school, where they were imprisoned.

“They told us we would go to Jagomir. There were lot of us in the school. They moved us in trucks, I saw my friend Dragan, who was a reserve policeman, drive a truck, so I rode with him in the driver’s cabin. When we settled in Jagomir, the pre-war policeman Boban came and told me my father sent him and he would try to have me released tomorrow, which he did,” said the witness.

Cormehmedic added that he learnt after the war that some of his Bosniak neighbours from Nahorevo were killed.

Goran Saric is charged, as head of the police station in the Serb municipality Centre in Sarajevo, with ordering all men from Nahorevo to come to the community centre on June 19, 1992, after which around 100 Bosniaks were taken and imprisoned in the Jagomir hospital building.

According to the indictment, on June 21, 1992, Saric separated the prisoners into three groups. Sixty were taken by force to Sarajevo, 26 in the second group were transferred to the Bunker camp in Vogosca, while 11 from the third group were later killed at Skakavac in Sarajevo.

Another witness, Radmilo Mocevic, testified that one day in 1992, while he was returning from the hospital at Pale, he saw an “unknown army” in Nahorevo and heard shooting.

“I saw one of the soldiers was wounded and being put in the car and then soldiers taking away witness S-3. I tried to protect him because I knew him."

"I succeeded, but then, when the soldiers saw that local people trusted me, I had to go where the Bosniaks were being called to surrender from a school over the megaphone. I went there and told them to surrender so that people would not get killed. When they surrendered, I went home,” said Mocevic.

The trial is set to resume on October 19.