Serb says he shot first in killing of Bosnian Muslims

A suspect in a trial of five Serb militiamen charged with the videotaped execution of six Bosnian Muslim civilians acknowledged that he was the first to shoot them, but said he was carrying out orders, according to testimony read in court today.

The suspects at the landmark trial that opened yesterday were charged after the June airing of the 1995 video showing six people being taken from a truck near Srebrenica, their hands bound and sprayed with machine gun fire from behind.

The five face up to 40 years in jail if convicted. Serbia has abolished the death penalty.

Pero Petrasevic, one of the suspects, refused to enter a plea today, demanding that the video material be omitted as evidence at the trial in Serbia’s Special War Crimes Court.

Instead, his testimony to a pre-trial judge was read in court today.

“I was the first to fire the shots in the back of the prisoners,” Petrasevic’s testimony said. “After that, I don’t remember anything else.”

The commander of the dreaded “Scorpions” paramilitary unit, Slobodan Medic, ordered the execution and demanded that it be filmed, Petrasevic said, according to the testimony.

“I did not envisage my war campaign to be like that, but I had to carry out the order,” the testimony said.

In statements to the court yesterday, Medic said he did not issue the order to shoot the Muslims and added that if he had known that the footage would become public, he would have “killed like a rabbit” the Serb soldier who filmed it.

As many as 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed when Bosnian Serb troops over-ran Srebrenica in 1995. It was Europe’s worst mass killing since the Second World War.

The chilling video, first shown in June at the UN war crimes tribunal of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague, Netherlands, showed four Bosnian Muslim men being shot dead on a hillside. The two others were ordered to carry the bodies into a nearby barn where they, too, were killed.

The footage, which caused public outrage in Bosnia as well as in Serbia, was considered by some legal experts as strong evidence linking Milosevic to genocide in the Srebrenica killings.

In his testimony, Petrasevic said the six Muslim victims were ordered to lie down and wait until a fresh camera battery was installed so the video could be made.

Medic wanted the execution to be filmed so he could show it to his superiors, who ultimately ordered the slaying, Petrasevic said. He did not specify who the superiors were.

The trial in Belgrade was seen as a key test of the ability of Serbia’s judiciary to deal with cases of war crimes committed by Serbs during the bloody break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.