Hague Tribunal

Ultranationalist politician and war criminal Vojislav Seselj and members of his Serbian Radical Party on Wednesday evening physically forced anti-war activists out of a building in Belgrade's Stari Grad municipality where Seselj was promoting his new book denying that the Srebrenica massacres were genocide.

Families of victims, Bosnian politicians and ordinary Sarajevans gathered to lay flowers and pay tributes on Wednesday at the site of the Markale market shelling on the 26th anniversary of the deadly attack during the siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb forces.

The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals said that it has rejected an appeal for early release from Miroslav Bralo, a former member of the 'Jokers' anti-terrorist unit of the Croatian Defence Council, the wartime Bosnian Croat force.

Drago Josipovic, who served a sentence for his participation in an attack on the village of Ahmici in April 1993 in which over 100 Bosniaks were killed, was due to be buried on Monday afternoon at a Catholic cemetery in Vitez in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Josipovic died on Saturday at the age of 65.

The first year of the trial in Belgrade for the abduction and killing of 20 passengers from a train at Strpci station in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war in 1993 has heard testimony from relatives of the victims, other passengers, policemen, Bosnian Serb Army soldiers and the defendants themselves, as a fuller picture of the crime more than 26 years ago began to emerge.

On May 9, retired Yugoslav Army general Vladimir Lazarevic, a convicted war criminal, headed a World War II Victory Day parade through the streets of the southern Serbian city of Nis. The showpiece event was organised by Russian war veterans with the backing of the Serbian authorities.

The Bosnian state prosecution on Friday charged Milan Lukic, the wartime leader of the Avengers paramilitary group, with crimes against 20 passengers who were abducted from a train at Strpci station near Visegrad in eastern Bosnia in February 1993 and then murdered.

Two Bosnian war victims' groups, the Association of Victims and Witnesses of Genocide and the Mothers of Srebrenica, held a small protest on Tuesday outside the Swedish embassy in Sarajevo to express anger about a letter from the Nobel Committee defending the award of this year's prestigious literature prize to Austrian author Peter Handke.

Radomir Susnjar told the Bosnian state court on Thursday that he felt pity for the victims, but did not participate in the murder of 57 civilians in a house in Pionirska Street in Visegrad in June 1992.

"I do not feel guilty, because I am not the person who did that," said ex-fighter Susnjar.

"We recommended to the Bosnian state prosecution to reconstitute regional teams that they had in order to maintain expertise in a particular area of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I think a part of [the problem] is the management, a part of it is the quality of indictments, so I think that there is an issue there," Berton explained.