Life Terms Urged for Six Serbs at The Hague

Belgrade _ Prosecutors at The Hague are demanding sentences of up to life imprisonment for six former Serbian officials charged with war crimes in the 1999 Kosovo conflict.

Prosecutors suggested that, if the Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, based at The Hague, finds the six guilty as charged, individual sentences varying from 20 years to life should be passed.

The trial of Serbia’s former President Milan Milutinovic and the then Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic, the Army Chief of Staff Dragoljub Ojdanic, the Commander of the Third Army Nebojsa Pavkovic, the Commander of the Pristina Corps Vladimir Lazarevic and Serbia’s top policeman in Kosovo, Sreten Lukic, started in 2006 and came to its end Tuesday with the prosecutors’ 8-hour closing statements.

The defence lawyers will have two and half hours each for their final arguments. Read more: http://balkaninsight.com/en/main/news/12464

The six are charged with forced deportations, murder and the persecution of ethnic Albanian civilians during the 1999 armed conflict in what was then Serbia’s southern province of Kosovo.