Mladic trial resumes to hear survivor

PanARMENIAN.Net - The war crimes trial of Bosnian Serb ex-army chief Ratko Mladic is about to hear from its first witness, who survived a mass execution in 1992, BBC News reported.

Elvedin Pasic will describe the attack by Serb forces on the Bosnian village of Grabovica, where about 150 people were killed, prosecutors say.

Gen Mladic denies 11 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity dating back to the 1992-95 Bosnian War.

The trial was halted in May because of "irregularities" by the prosecution.

The UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague said the suspension was the result of an error in the disclosure of documents to the defense.

Gen Mladic, now 70, is the last of the key figures wanted for war crimes during the Bosnian War. On the run for 16 years before his arrest, Gen Mladic has refused to enter a plea.

Some of the relatives of victims and survivors of the war have expressed concern that if the trial takes too long, Gen Mladic, who has suffered from heart problems, will die before a verdict is reached.

Pasic would "describe the destruction and damage to residential property, attacks on villages [and] the persecution of non-Serbs", the prosecutors said in a witness list before the court.

They said their witness, a Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) who was a teenager at the time, would recall how he was separated from other men in his family and later "survived the execution of around 150 people in November 1992 in the village of Grabovica".

Later this week, the court is due to hear from the retired British general, Sir Richard Dannatt, who served as deputy commander of NATO's force in Bosnia.

However, the Mladic defense team has called for his expert evidence to be thrown out.

There will also be an anonymous witness, who survived the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. He is expected to tell the court how he saw prisoners being lined up in groups of 10 and executed.

Around 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from Srebrenica were killed after the town was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces in July of that year - in what was the worst atrocity in Europe since the end of World War II.