The prosecution puts some unpleasant questions to witness Ljubo Bojanovic about a "trivial note" in the duty officer's log of the Zvornik Brigade, jotted down in July 1995


"Skelani has two wounded Turks. They cut themselves on glass. I said they were to be killed."

This note from the logbbok of the duty operations officer of the Zvornik Brigade, entered on 23 July 1995, had been tendered into evidence by the defense, but was quoted today by the prosecution in the cross-examination of the witness Ljubo Bojanovic, former officer for morale, religious and legal affairs in the VRS Zvornik Brigade.

Bojanovic confirmed that the "trivial note" was made by him, but he stated that it had been written "in a temper". His assistant had previously received a message that the military police from Skelani wanted the Zvornik Brigade to take in two wounded Bosniak prisoners. The witness stressed that he had reacted that way because Skelani were 100 km away from Zvornik, outside of the area of responsibility of his brigade. No matter what he said, he added, "it wouldn’t have been done there", the two prisoners had "certainly been given aid."

"Are you sure?" asked prosecutor Antoinette Issa, and then like a detective, presenting documents in the possession of the prosecution, she reconstructed the whole story about the two Bosniak prisoners that were the subject of the note made by the Zvornik Brigade duty officer "in a temper."

The first document was a Serbian MUP report, made at the border near Bajina Basta: on 23 July, a group of eight Bosniaks were handed over to the military police in Skelani. Among them were Sadik Salihovic and Hamdija Delic from Srebrenica, who had tried to avoid being handed over by cutting their throats with a broken bottle. They were bleeding heavily. In another document – the entry in the logbook of the Bratunac Brigade military police for the same date – it is stated that a group of Bosniaks, including two young men with "self-inflicted wounds" had been taken over from Skelani and placed in detention. At that point, they disappeared without a trace.

Ljubo Bojanovic is the third defense witness called by Dragan Jokic, former engineer chief of the Zvornik Brigade, charged with aiding and abetting the crimes in Srebrenica in July 1995. All three witnesses claimed in their examination-in-chief that neither them not Jokic had any knowledge of the mass executions of captured Bosniaks after the fall of Srebrenica on 11 July. In cross-examinations, the prosecutors are trying to impeach the witnesses by quoting from the "duty operations officer's logbook", either kept by the witnesses themselves or containing entries in which they are mentioned.

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