Bosnian court indicts three Serbs for massacre

Bosnian Serb troops led by general Mladic summarily executed some 8,000 Muslim men and boys after overrunning the UN-designed safe area.

SARAJEVO, January 18, 2010 (AFP) - Bosnia's state court has charged three Bosnian Serb former police officers with genocide for their alleged role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Muslims, the court said Monday .

Dusko Jevic, 52, Mendeljev Djuric, 49, and Goran Markovic, 45, are accused of participating in a "systematic joint criminal enterprise aimed at expelling women and children and killing Muslim men," the court said in a statement quoted by Bosnian news agency Fena.

The former policemen have all been arrested and are currently in detention, it added.

At the time of the massacre, the only episode in the bloody 1992-1995 Bosnian war that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruled a genocide, Jevic was deputy commander of a special Bosnian Serb police brigade. Djuric was the commander of one of the companies in the brigade and Markovic headed another of its units.

According to the indictment issued by the Bosnian court's war crimes chamber their units committed crimes against Srebrenica civilians from July 10-19 1995.

Bosnian Serb troops led by general Ratko Mladic summarily executed some 8,000 Muslim men and boys after overrunning the enclave designated a United Nations safe area.

The ICTY in The Hague prosecutes those deemed most responsible for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia, mostly the political and army leadership.

Local tribunals are mandated to prosecute the lower ranking suspects.

The 1992-95 war in Bosnia left more than 100,000 people dead and some two million internally displaced.