EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN ACTION / Alla Tymofeyeva (ed.)

On 8 December 2000 the Police Prevention of Terrorism Unit interviewed the applicant. She reiterated that at 9.45 p.m. on 15 November 1991 five men, wearing camouflage uniforms and balaclavas, had come to their house and taken her husband. All five men were carrying firearms. She further reiterated that she had reported the entire incident to the police on the same evening. They also questioned the doctor who had carried out the autopsy on V.’s body and V.’s relatives, who confirmed the statement given by the applicant. On 24 December 2002 an investigating judge at the County Court heard evidence from witness M.M., who said that in 1991 he had been a member of the reserve police. One night he had been driving in a car with three of his colleagues (he identified them by their nicknames) when they saw a van parked in the street and several men dressed in camouflage uniforms standing around it. M.M. and his colleagues asked those men what was happening and were told that they had come “to search the house of a Serb who had some hunting weapons”. One of the men took off his balaclava and M.M. recognised him as [A.]H. He also saw an older woman crying and wailing, and asking the men to release the man they were taking with them. M.M. and his friends had then driven away. Later he heard that the man who had been taken away was V.; he had been taken to Jodno, a sanatorium where Croatian troops were stationed at the material time, opposite the Siscia factory. He had received that information from a person called G., who also told him that V. had been liquidated and thrown in the river Kupa. M.M. further explained that one night he noticed that several persons were being held in the toilet of the ORA military base, where he was stationed. Next to the toilet he saw three bodies covered with a blanket. M.M. added that on several occasions he had seen the police taking naked persons into the ORA Croatian military base, and sometimes he had heard screams from the barracks. On 26 March 2003 the Police interviewed an anonymous witness who gave information about the killings of persons of Serbian origin in the area in 1991 and 1992. He said that the arrests and killings of persons of Serbian ethnic origin had been carried out on the orders of Đ.B., Head of the Police, who had a list of persons to be arrested and liquidated. As regards the arrest of V., the witness identified M.M. as one of the persons implicated. He said that V. had first been taken to the police station and then taken to the ORA and killed there. One of the persons who had arrested V. was A.H., who had also killed him. The witness added that he was willing to give his evidence about those events before a court. On 19 May 2003 another anonymous witness was interviewed by the County State Attorney’s Office. He said that at the beginning of 1991 he joined the Croatian Army, namely the Office for the Defence. He had been assigned to the reserve units of the County Police, headed by Đ.B. He stated that victims had been arrested at their homes and that money, gold and other valuables had always been taken. The victims had first been taken to the police station, then to Jodno, and later to the ORA military base, where they had been stripped and killed. He said that he had personally been involved in the arrest of V. and that his hunting guns had also been taken from his house. 1. On 29 July 2005 the State Attorney’s Office issued a document on enquiries into the killings of civilians between 1991 and 1995. The document was addressed to the County State Attorney’s Offices, which were required to examine all of the information collected to date on the killings of civilians during that period and to concentrate their activities on identifying the perpetrators and gathering the relevant evidence in order to initiate criminal proceedings. On 9 October 2008 the State Attorney’s Office issued an instruction for implementation of the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure to the County State Attorney’s Offices, in which they indicated that an inspection of their work had indicated two main problems: possible partiality of the persons involved in the pending proceedings as regards the ethnicity of the victims or the perpetrators; and the problem of trials in absentia. The instructions favoured impartial investigations of all war crimes, irrespective of the ethnicity of those involved, whether

EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN ACTION

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