Speaking at the retrial of member of parliament Branimir Glavas and his co-defendants, charged with the killing and torture of Serb civilians in Osijek in 1991, key witness Nikola Jaman on Tuesday changed his earlier testimony in which he said that it was him and not Glavas who had commanded a local military unit.

“I accept that I was the commander… but I and everybody else were under the command of Branimir Glavas who was the boss in Osijek,” Jaman said.

Before his testimony, Jaman said via media that he had lied in the original trial in order to save Glavas and that he changed his testimony because he started wrestling with his conscience in the final stages of an incurable disease.

Responding to the prosecution’s remark that in his original testimony he said that Glavas had not been a part of the local commanding structure, Jaman said that he had lied at the time.

Testifying in Glavas’s initial trial in January 2009, Jaman said that as a local defence secretary, Glavas had been in charge of logistics and that he had not exercised command powers.

Glavas objected to the credibility of Jaman’s testimony, saying that he was lying.

The retrial in two war crimes cases, dubbed ‘Garage’ and ‘Duct tape’, was scheduled after the Supreme Court in early January quashed a Zagreb County Court ruling of March 2018 under which the retrial of Glavas was to be separated from proceedings against his co-defendants.

In the initial trial Glavas and the other accused were sentenced to lengthy prison terms but the final verdict was quashed by the Supreme Court. By that time Glavas had served most of his eight-year term in prisons in Bosnia and Herzegovina where he fled before the announcement of the trial court verdict.