At the trial of Veselin ‘Batko’ Vlahovic for war crimes committed in the Sarajevo neighbourhood of Grbavica, the defence started presentation of its evidence.
Sasa Baricanin, who is serving 18 years prison sentence for war crimes in Grbavica, said that in September 1992 he was not with Vlahovic in Grbavica, because at the time he was in Belgrade having a medical treatment.
Vlahovic’s defence presented medical documentation for Baricanin’s treatment in the Belgrade hospital after he was wounded.
“I do not know the witnesses Esma and Malik Pasic, but I would like to have met them, because I am going to sue them for perjury,” said Baricanin.
In March, a married couple Malik and Esma Pasic testified that Vlahovic first took their neighbours away from their building and then forced them to leave their apartment at Kovacici.
Malik Pasic said that in mid-September 1992 Vlahovic and another three Bosnian Serb soldiers came to their apartment and told them to leave by following day because they needed the apartment “for Batko’s mother”.
The prosecution charges Vlahovic with murders, rapes, abuses, robbery, disappearances and other inhuman acts committed in 1992 against Bosniak and Croat civilians in the Sarajevo neigbourhoods of Grbavica, Vraca and Kovacici.
Another defence witness, Djordje Nedeljkov, Vlahovic’s former lawyer from Serbia, said that he was regularly seeing the defendant in Novi Sad in late 1992 and in 1993.
Asked by the prosecutor, Sanja Jukic, whether he saw the accused in Novi Sad between June and September 1992, the witness replied that he did not.
The trial will resume on October 3, 2012.
Timeline of events in the case against 13 former Serb fighters charged with committing war crimes in the villages of Cuska, Zahac, Ljubenic and Pavlac in Kosovo in 1999.