Jul 29, 2008, 14:51 GMT
Sarajevo - The War Crimes Chamber of Bosnia-Herzegovina's State Court on Tuesday handed down verdicts against 11 Bosnian Serb genocide suspects, sentencing seven to a total of 284 years in jail and acquitting four.
Milenko Trifunovic, Brano Dzinic and Aleksandar Radovanovic received 42 years jail each; Milos Stupar, Slobodan Jakovljevic and Branislav Medan received 40 years each, while Petar Mitrovic was sentenced to 38 years jail.
All of them were declared guilty of genocide during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The court declared Velibor Maksimovic, Dragisa Zivanovic, Milovan Matic and Miladin Stevanovic not guilty and released them.
The group was charged with genocide on the basis of their involvement in the 1995 massacre in the former Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, in which Bosnian Serb troops massacred up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men after capturing the area on July 11, 1995.
At the time, the enclave of Srebrenica was under United Nations control as a safe haven.
The accused, according to the indictment, were directly involved in killing of more than 1,000 Bosnian Muslim men from Srebrenica detained in a Farming Cooperative Warehouse in the village of Kravice, near Srebrenica.
'This crime was allegedly committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Muslim (Bosniak) population inside the UN protected area of Srebrenica carried out by the Bosnian Serb Army and the Ministry of Interior, with a joint plan to annihilate in part a group of Muslim people,' read the indictment.
At the time of the crime's commission, Milenko Trifunovic, Milos Stupar and Brano Dzinic were high-ranking officers of the special police, while others served with the special police troops in the Srebrenica area.
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