more than 25 years after the end of the war in Yugoslavia, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (Momut) issued a decision in the case of two former employees of the Yugoslav State Security Department of Schnishich’s Jovitsy and Franco Simatovich. Reports about it Deutsche Welle.
On Wednesday, on June 30, the court sentenced them to 12 years of conclusion, recognizing guilty of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In particular, they are recognized as guilty of persecution, murders, deportation and the violent movement of Croats and Bosnian Muslims. According to the charges, thereby during the war in Croatia (1991-1995) and the Bosnian War (1992-1995) they tried to create “ethnically pure Great Serbia.”
It is noted that the court re-examined the cases of 70-year-old Stanishić and 71-year-old Symatovich, who were the closest associates of the former President of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevich. Their case was already considered by the UN International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (MTBY) from 2009 to 2013, then they were recognized as innocent for insufficient evidence. The prosecutor’s office filed an appeal, which was satisfied in December 2015, and the case was sent to a new consideration in Momat.
Stanishich in the 1990s was headed by the State Security Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Yugoslavia, and Simatovich commanded special forces at the same department.