Bosnian Serb Ex-Official Blames Army Officer for Massacre

Tomislav Kovac, who was deputy interior minister in the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska entity in July 1995, when the Kravica massacre happened, told Belgrade Higher Court on Tuesday that Ljubisa Beara, who at the time was the security chief of the Main Headquarters of the Bosnian Serb Army, was to blame for the killings.

"He [Beara] was the trigger… [for] this process of killing prisoners of war to start. The person who should have prevented that ordered it," Kovac said.

According to the indictment, Bosnian Serb forces killed 1,313 Bosniaks from Srebrenica in a hangar at a farm in Kravica on July 13 and 14.

The killings in Kravica were among several massacres after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995 that left more than 7,000 Bosniak men and boys dead.

Serb ex-policemen Nedeljko Milidragovic, Aleksa Golijanin, Milivoje Batinica, Aleksandar Dacevic, Bora Miletic, Jovan Petrovic, Dragomir Parovic and Vidosav Vasic are on trial in Belgrade for organising and participating in the shootings.

Kovac said that the Bosniak prisoners attacked one of their guards, a member of Bosnian Serb police special forces, took his gun and shot him dead because they had already come under attack themselves from a member of the Serb forces, Milan Lukic, who was under Beara's command.

"That is why those Muslims attacked them, because they were shot at by the other side, that has been established," Kovac told the court.

"He [Lukic] shot at them and then one of them came to that special policeman and killed him," he added.
The killing of the special policeman sparked the massacre, Kovac testified.

"When the prisoners killed that soldier, they [other Serb troops] responded so brutally that many of them were tried for that, some in The...