SERBIA: Five Serbs, whose alleged execution of Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica was caught on a comrade's gruesome "trophy film", went on trial in Belgrade yesterday.
The men are accused of being members of the Scorpions paramilitary unit that helped besiege the mainly Bosnian Muslim town in July 1995, and of taking part in the murder of some 8,000 Muslims in Europe's worst atrocity since the second World War.
They were arrested after the video was broadcast on national television in Serbia and Bosnia, showing camouflaged Scorpion fighters laughing and smoking cigarettes in a sunny glade, before torturing and shooting dead six unarmed and bound men.
In Serbia's first trial of men accused of involvement in the Srebrenica massacre, the first defendant in the dock was former Scorpions commander Slobodan Medic (39), who claimed he knew nothing of the killings until he saw the footage on television.
He insisted he did not order the execution of civilians, but could not control some soldiers who wanted to avenge relatives killed by Muslim forces. "I think I did everything as best I could, considering the circumstances.
"Death there was a relative thing, we were all carrying death certificates in our pockets and were just waiting for the date to be filled in," he said.
He also said he would have killed "like a rabbit" the soldier who filmed the executions if he had known what he was doing.
