Koricanske stijene: Murders on a Cliff
26 August 2010
A protected witness told the trial of five indictees charged with crimes at Koricanske stijene that he saw members of the Interventions Squad shooting people from the bus he was driving.
Witness KS2 said he drove a bus filled with civilians from Prijedor to Travnik and that members of the Interventions Squad separated “men capable of military service” from the other passengers on Mount Vlasic.
“A police vehicle, a VW Golf, waited for us on the top of the cliff and stopped us. When I got off the bus, I heard shooting coming from the place where the second bus was parked. They started taking people from my bus and shooting at them. Their bodies fell down into the chasm. I saw them take out six men, but I could no longer watch it,” KS2 said.
Sasa Zecevic, Radoslav Knezevic, Petar Civcic, Branko Topola and Marinko Ljepoja are charged with the murders of about 200 men at Koricanske stijene on August 21, 1992. They are accused of escorting a convoy of civilians travelling from Prijedor to Travnik and selecting about 200 men who were then shot.
The indictment alleges that Zecevic, Knezevic, Civcic and Ljepoja were members of the Interventions Squad with the Public Safety Station in Prijedor and that Topola was a guard in Trnopolje detention camp at the time.
The witness said that he and the other bus driver walked away from the murder scene and went to a place behind a curve in the road along with Gordan Djuric.
“We left the place as I got sick. We could no longer see anything, but we heard shooting. Djuric, whom I knew, was standing there with us. A military vehicle then came from the opposite direction. Two men dressed in officer uniforms came out of it. They said it was not a good thing to do it, and they went back,” KS2 said.
Djuric, a former member of the Interventions Squad, was sentenced to eight years in prison for crimes committed at Koricanske stijene.
The witness said after the shooting – which lasted for “about 20 minutes” – they went to the village of Koricani where they stayed for one hour waiting for the rest of the convoy to return from Vlasic. KS2 was alone in the bus on his way back to Prijedor.
The next hearing takes place on September 2.
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