Barry Hogan, witness at the Radovan Karadzic trial

At the trial of Radovan Karadzic, the prosecution case about the sniper and artillery terror campaign in Sarajevo is drawing to its close. OTP investigator Barry Hogan was examined. When general Stanislav Galic and Dragomir Milosevic were on trial, Hogan visited all the sites where the civilians were either killed or wounded in Sarajevo and collected documents about the operations of the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps.

In the examination-in chief Hogan marked on the photos and maps of Sarajevo the sites of all 16 sniper incidents listed in the indictment against Karadzic. Hogan explained that in every single case, either the victims or the eyewitnesses were able to show the locations of the incident and point to the direction from which the shots had been fired, to the best of their recollections. Hogan duly marked them on panoramic photos and maps of Sarajevo. As he explained, he used a GPS device to read every single location correctly.

In 2007, the witness used crimes scene photos to ‘test’ the theory put forward by Russian colonel Andrej Demurenko, who claimed at the trial of General Milosevic that the shell that caused the massacre at the Markale market on 28 August 1995 ‘was not fired from VRS positions’. Forty-three Sarajevo citizens were killed and 75 were injured by the shell.

In his evidence, Demurenko had claimed that he had personally visited all the locations on the Serb side from which the shell could have been fired and, as he’d said, could not see any evidence that heavy artillery had been deployed there. On the other hand, the prosecution at that trial used Hogan’s photos taken at different locations to show that Demurenko had miscalculated the direction of the shell’s trajectory and thus was wrong about the mortar positions from which the shell could have been fired.

Karadzic contested every single claim in his cross-examination. Apart from his usual claims that the Sarajevo investigations were done using ‘sticks and pieces of string’ and were unreliable, Karadzic challenged the validity of the GPS device Hogan used in his investigations and contested the evidence of victims and eyewitnesses about the actual incident sites and the direction from which the shots came.

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