Court convicts 12 of Serbian PM's assassination

Slobodan Milosevic’s paramilitary commander and 11 other people were today convicted of assassinating Serbia’s first democratically-elected prime minister, Zoran Djindjic.

The Special Court in Belgrade said Milorad Ulemek – former head of the elite Red Berets paramilitary unit set up by former President Milosevic during the wars in Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s – organised the March 12, 2003, killing in front of Serbian government headquarters. Judges were to announce the sentences later today.

The Serbian paramilitaries and gang figures – war veterans from former President Slobodan Milosevic’s era – had been charged with organising and carrying out the March 2003 sniper attack in front of the Belgrade government headquarters.

The indictment said they assassinated Djindjic to halt pro-Western reforms, bring nationalists back to power and stop further extradition of war crimes suspects to the UN war crimes tribunal.

Djindjic spearheaded Milosevic’s removal from power in 2000.

He later handed Milosevic over to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, to answer for his role in the 1990s wars during the break-up of Yugoslavia. Milosevic died of a heart attack in his prison cell last year.

The landmark trial of the 12, Serbia’s first for organised crime, started in December 2003.

It has been delayed by bureaucratic and legal wrangling, the murder of two prosecution witnesses, resignation of a chief judge only months before it concluded, and apparent attempts by Djindjic’s political successors to influence the trial proceedings.

The prosecution and lawyers representing Djindjic’s family have demanded maximum 40-year prison sentences for his suspected killers.

All but one of the suspects have denied they organised and carried out the assassination.

Five of the 12 suspects were being tried in absentia because they went into hiding after the killing.