The Supreme Court has upheld a trial court verdict for Rajko Krickovic, whom the Rijeka County Court sentenced to 10 years in prison for the murder of three Serb civilians in the village of Kijani near Gracac in August 1995.

Without revealing the identity of the accused, the Supreme Court said that an aggravating circumstance in Krickovic’s case was that he killed three people whom he had known from before and who did not pose any threat to his unit.

Another aggravating circumstance was that the third victim was burned alive, the Supreme Court said.

The extenuating circumstances in the case were that Krickovic did not have a criminal record but the court did not find his participation in the 1991-95 Homeland War to be an extenuating circumstance.

The court found that during the 1995 combined military and police operation Storm, aimed at liberating areas held by Croatian Serb rebels, Krickovic participated in an operation to recover his fellow fighters’ bodies from a mine field where they were killed and attended their funeral in Zagreb.

After that, he returned to his unit in Lika and visited his village of Krickovici, where he saw that his house had been burned down. He saw outside his neighbours’ house Radomir (43) and Mira (45) Sovilj and opened fire at them from a machine-gun, killing them as they were trying to escape to a nearby forest. He then killed their mother, a 73-year-old woman, and set on fire the house she was in.