A Bosnian court on Monday jailed a Bosnian Serb for 15 years for the killing of five Muslims during the Balkan nation’s 1990s war.
Dusko Zoric, a 55-year-old extradited by Germany last year, was found guilty by Bosnia’s state court of crimes against humanity during the 1992-95 conflict, which left about 100,000 people dead.
At least 69 Bosnian Muslims, half of them women and children, were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in the village of Zecovi, near Prijedor, a Bosnian Serb-majority city, in July 1992.
Prijedor is notorious for the creation of the Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje detention camps, collectively known as the “Triangle of Horror,” where around 6,000 people, mainly Bosnian Muslims and Croatians, were killed by Bosnian forces between April and August 1992.
Judge Saban Maksumic said the five men killed by Zoric had just been arrested in their homes in the village.
The defendant, who was 21 at the time, killed them with an automatic rifle on a roadside. Maksumic said Zoric’s involvement had been proved “beyond all reasonable doubt”.
Zoric was acquitted, however, of charges of taking part in the killing two days later of about 30 women and children who were hiding in two houses in Zecovi.
A survivor of the massacre, aged 15 at the time, identified Zoric, but the judge said there was no definitive proof.
Five other Bosnian Serbs were jailed for between five and 20 years in 2023 for the massacre.
