Emir Turkusic, witness at the Radovan Karadzic trial

Emir Turkusic, former employee of the Counter-Sabotage Department in the BH MUP testified at the trial of Radovan Karadzic and said that the modified air bombs used to target Sarajevo during the war were ‘inaccurate’ and designed primarily to ‘kill, destroy and intimidate’.

In his cross-examination, Karadzic claimed those bombs were ‘accurate’. ‘We had excellent factories and excellent professionals,’ Karadzic said, adding, ‘Those things were not made in forges, or car body shops, but in high-tech factories’.

‘If you are claiming those bombs were accurate, then you did it deliberately,’ Turkusic answered, reminding the accused that a modified air bomb hit Alipasino polje, one of the most densely populated areas in Sarajevo. He rejected Karadzic’s suggestion that the BH Army also produced modified air bombs.

As the cross-examination continued, Karadzic questioned the results of the Sarajevo investigations, claiming that the investigators would ‘deliberately turn the globe around and mix up the points on the compass’ when they determined the direction from which the fatal shells had been fired, in order to ‘make it appear’ as if they had been fired from VRS-controlled areas. ‘Our findings are unequivocal and unassailable,’ the witness said, noting that the compass used by the Sarajevo investigators ‘shows the cardinal points in the same way everywhere you go’.

Turkusic said that the Serb forces would sometimes fire shells on the same area twice, at short intervals, in order to kill or maim those who were trying to help the casualties of the first explosion. When Karadzic asked the witness to give him an example, the witness said he could recall several such incidents at Sarajevo cemeteries.

In the re-examination, the prosecutor illustrated the witness’s claims by a report filed by British correspondent Jeremy Bowen. As he watched the footage showing artillery shells and sniper rounds hit the family and friends gathered around the grave of Vedrana Glavas, who had herself been killed by a sniper, Turkusic said, ‘If this is not terrorizing the civilians, I don’t know what is.’ He completed his two-day testimony with a Latin maxim, ‘Fiat iustitia et pereat mundus’, or ‘Let there be justice, though the world perish’.

Before the one-month adjournment, the judges again warned Karadzic that he wasted too much time on irrelevant issues and comments in his cross-examination, warning him that if he persisted, the Chamber could decide this constituted grounds for restricting his right to self-representation.

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