Bosnia and Herzegovina: Police arrest two war crime suspects

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Bosnian state police identified and arrested two war crime suspects charged with attacks on civilians during the 1992-95 war in the country's northwest.

They were placed under arrest in Banja Luka area, north of the country, at an order by the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Bosko Unicanin and Dragan Despot are accused of acting against the Geneva Conventions during a “broad and systemic attack on Bosniak civilians in Bosnian Krajina (Bosnia’s north and northwest) area as members of Republika Srpska Army (ex Bosnian Serb forces),” said the indictment.

The indictment charges the suspects with taking Bosniak civilians out of a local school’s building in the Velagici village, near Kljuc, on June 1, 1992, and executing at least 78 of them. The victims’ bodies were then loaded onto trucks and buried in a mass grave. The remains were found immediately after the end of the war, in 1996, and exhumed from the Laniste II mass grave.

The suspects are accused of committing the crime against humanity, defined by the Criminal Code of Bosnia and Herzegovina.