Bosnian massacre police chief jailed

A former Bosnian Serb police commander was jailed for 17 years today for the murders of more than 200 Muslim men in 1992.

Darko Mrdja (aged 36) stood silently as Judge Alphonse Orie announced the verdict, nearly a year after Mrdja confessed to the crime in a plea bargain with UN prosecutors in The Hague.

“The sentence should reflect all of the cruelty embodied in Darko Mrdja’s participation in the killing and the shooting,” Orie said. “We do not accept that Mrdja had no alternative but to participate in the massacre.”

When the three-way war erupted in 1992 between Bosnia’s main ethnic groups - Muslims, Serbs and Croats – Mrdja was a police commander in the north-western Serb-dominated city of Prijedor, where hundreds of local Muslims were captured and held in prison camps.

In August of that year, police officers under Mrdja’s command put a group of Muslim inmates onto two buses and told them they would be taken to a Muslim-held territory and exchanged for Serbs.

Instead, the victims were transported to a mountain cliff and mowed down with machine guns. Some jumped into the ravine before they could be shot. Twelve were known to have survived and 228 died.

A decade later, UN prosecutors secretly brought charges against Mrdja, also known as Dado, enabling Nato-led troops in Bosnia to catch him by surprise and transfer him to the court in The Hague.

“He was not the architect of the massacre,” the judge said, referring to Mrdja’s claims that he was only following orders from his superiors.

“But his participation in the large-scale massacre is uncontested. He must have been well aware that he violated the laws of war and the basic principles of humanity,” Orie said.