Bosnian Serb Prosecutors Drop Probe into Wartime Destruction of Mosques

Citing the statute of limitations, the public prosecution in Banja Luka told BIRN it had terminated investigations in February this year in five cases against one of more unidentified persons concerning the destruction of six mosques between March and July 1993.

Banja Luka was a Bosnian Serb stronghold during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and is now the administrative seat of the predominantly Serb-populated Republika Srpska, one of Bosnia's two entities. More than a dozen of the town's mosques were destroyed during the war.

The cases under investigation concern the Zulfikarpasina and Mehdi-begova mosques in Banja Luka and four others in the Gradiska municipality to the north.

The investigation had been carried out by the District Public Prosecution in Banja Luka until it was transferred to the State Prosecution in 2014, the Banja Luka prosecution said. It was then sent back last year following a revision to the strategy for processing war crimes, under which less complex cases were to be transferred to lower-level prosecutions.

The Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, however, told BIRN that the District Public Prosecution in Banja Luka had told it that the cases had not been investigated as war crimes. The Islamic Community complained to the prosecutor's office, which rejected the complaint as unfounded.

Other cases concerning the destruction of cultural heritage have been prosecuted as war crimes, including at the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY.

Aldina Suljagic-Piro of the Legal and Administrative Office of the Islamic Community said the Banja Luka prosecutors had investigated the cases under the criminal offence of demolition of cultural and historical monuments...