Trial for alleged Kravica war crimes postponed again

NEWS 24.05.201813:45
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The main hearing in the retrial of eight members of the Special Police Unit of the Republika Srpska (RS), Bosnia's Serb-dominated entity, charged with committing war crimes in Bosnia's eastern village Kravica, was postponed on Thursday again due to the health problems of one of the eight defendants.

The hearing before a Belgrade court was first postponed on Wednesday after defendant Dragomir Parovic failed to appear in the courtroom. Parovic's attorney Vladan Stefanovic said his client was hospitalized ten days ago after cutting his veins and was currently undergoing a treatment at the Clinical Centre in Novi Sad.

The indictment charges eight members of the Special Police Unit of the RS with a war crime against Bosniak civilians in Kravica near Srebrenica, a UN safe area, in the Bosnian 1990s armed conflict.

According to the indictment, they participated in killings of more than one hundred Bosniaks during the massacre in Srebrenica which, the international courts ruled, constituted a genocide.

The trial was cancelled in November 2017 due to the lack of a war crime prosecutor in Serbia at that time. The retrial commenced in March this year.