Bosnia Court Jails Three for War Crimes

Bosnia`s war crimes court was set up in 2005 to take up some of the workload of the tribunal and take over low- and mid-level cases.

The Bosnian war crimes court jailed two ethnic Serbs for 17 years each and a Bosnian Croat for 10 years for war crimes against Bosnian Muslim civilians during the country's 1992-95 war.

Mirko Todorovic and Milos Radic were found guilty of taking part, along with other soldiers of the Bosnian Serb army, in killing eight of 14 Muslims who had been hiding in a quarry in eastern Bosnia in May 1992.

"The group ... took the civilians to a nearby creek, where seven of them were killed," the court said in a statement, adding that the eighth person was killed earlier.

The court also sentenced Pasko Ljubicic, a Bosnian Croat military police commander, to 10 years in prison over the persecution of Bosnian Muslim civilians in the village of Ahmici in April 1993, after he pleaded guilty.

The court said Ljubicic was found guilty of obeying an order to organise an attack on Ahmici on April 15-16, when more than 100 Muslim civilians were killed and their houses burned down.

"Ljubicic ... aided and abetted the planning and execution of this attack," the court said.

"Bosniak (Bosnian Muslims) civilians were expelled from the village of Ahmici during the attack, many suffered serious mental and physical injuries and two mosques were destroyed," the court added.

The sentence came after Ljubicic struck a plea-bargain agreement with the court. He was last year transferred for trial in Bosnia from the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Bosnia's war crimes court was set up in 2005 to take up some of the workload of the tribunal and take over low- and mid-level cases as the Hague court plans to wind down by 2010.