Soldier testifies at Milosevic trial

A SOLDIER who participated in the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica said yesterday at the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic that many of the victims were lined up in rows and shot with machine guns.

An estimated 7,500 Muslims were killed after the fall of the enclave of Srebrenica in a single week of bloodshed at the end of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. Prosecutors say the events were the result of Milosevic's alleged political aim of creating an ethnically pure Serbian state empty of non-Serbs.

Drazen Erdemovic, 31, took the stand against Milosevic after a three-week summer recess to describe how his battalion systematically killed around 1,000 to 1,200 people in July 1995 at the Branjevo farm in eastern Bosnia the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.