Serb Paramilitary Killers Must Face Justice, Bosnian Widow Pleads

Seven days before his 22nd birthday, Haris Talic was among more than 60 Bosniaks and Croats captured in the Sanski Most area of Bosnia and Herzegovina in September 1995 and then killed.

His wife Alma Talic told BIRN that paramilitaries from Serbian criminal boss Zeljko 'Arkan' Raznatovic's unit, accompanied by "local Serbs", seized her husband Haris from the village of Sehovci along with other Bosniak men.

She said that he went out of the house while she was putting their children to bed and was taken away in a bus.

"I saw him on the road and I called him by his name: 'Haris, Haris.' He just turned towards me and said: 'Take care of the kids,'" she said, recalling the last words that she exchanged with her husband.

A few days after her husband was taken away, Alma left the Sanski Most area with her three-year-old daughter and nine-month-old son and went to Zenica, where she tried to find out about her husband's fate through the Red Cross.

A grave containing the victims, including her husband, was eventually discovered in Sasina, another village in the municipality of Sanski Most, in 1996.

The killings in Sasina and another nearby village, Trnava, were included in the indictment of Serbian State Security Service officials Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic at the UN court in The Hague.

Stanisic and Simatovic were accused of supporting and controlling the paramilitaries who carried out the murders, but were acquitted of the charge relating to Sasina and Trnava by the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, MICT in The Hague in June 2021, following a retrial.

They were however sentenced to 12 years in prison each for crimes committed by a Serbian State Security Service special unit in Bosanski Samac in...