Former employee of the State Security Service in Prijedor who worked as an investigator in the Keraterm prison says that the Service didn’t investigate the massacre in Room No. 3. In July 1992, more than 150 persons were killed there. According to the witness, the investigation ‘was under the jurisdiction of the public security service, and not the state security service’


At the trial of former Bosnian Serb police officials Mico Stanisic and Stojan Zupljanin, the prosecution called former member of the State Security Service in Prijedor, Radomir Rodic.

From mid-May to August 1992, the witness visited the Keraterm prison camp in Prijedor on a daily basis to interrogate the prisoners about ‘their knowledge of and involvement in the armed rebellion against Serbs’. Although interviewing witnesses ‘legally was not a job for the state security service’, the witness said his boss had ordered him orally to do it. He estimates that during the spring and summer of 1992 about 1,700 people were examined.

Minors and the elderly were released as soon as the prison camp was established, the witness claimed. Others were released after an interrogation, if it was established that there were no grounds for their continued detention. This practice was later abandoned. Rodic claims that he saw some of the previously released prisoners back in the camp. He could clearly see that the persons he interviewed ‘suffered from lack of hygiene and food, and had to sleep on wooded boards’.

In the night of 25 July 1992, soldiers entered the prison camp and massacred more than 150 persons in Room 3. As alleged in the prosecution pre-trial brief, the police who were securing the prison camp didn’t prevent them. Some police officers even joined in the killing spree.

As the witness recounted, the next morning he saw ‘two or three bodies’ in the yard. Later, the witness heard that 150 to 170 persons were killed that night. The witness never got an official order to investigate the massacre in Room 3, but he nevertheless asked the prisoners he examined about the events. Rodic never drafted a report on the events of that night because it ‘didn’t fit’ in his job description: the State Security Service was not in charge of the security of the prison camp.

The defense of Stojan Zupljanin, the then chief of the Security Services Center in Banja Luka, highlighted the fact that in late May 1992 Muslims attacked Prijedor first. According to the defense counsel, the Serb merely responded to the Muslim attack; it was not a case of indiscriminate shelling of Muslim settlements villages and unlawful detention of civilians, as the prosecution alleges.

Zupljanin’s defense counsel Dragan Krgovic noted that the Prijedor police used official notes the witness had taken during the interviews in the Keraterm prison camp to file criminal reports. The defense also claimed that those notes were never forwarded to the Security Services Center in Banja Luka. The witness, however, was not able to clarify where exactly the notes ended up.

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