Bosnia jails Serbs over Srebrenica
Seven suspects sentenced for taking part in genocide during the massacre in 1995.
“They consciously killed hundreds of Bosnian Muslims with the aim of permanently removing Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica,” the judge said.
The killings were part of a week-long massacre by Bosnian Serb forces which took place at the warehouse of an agricultural co-operative near Srebrenica.
Landmark case
The case against ten wartime Bosnian Serb special police officers and a former soldier was the first before the court of Bosnia-Hercegovina in which the suspects were accused of genocide, and also the first for crimes committed in Srebrenica.
The trial chamber was composed of judges from Bosnia, the Netherlands and the United States.
Those convicted include Milos Stupar, 42, the wartime commander of a Bosnian Serb special police squad who was found guilty of not preventing murders or punishing the perpetrators.
Stupar and three others were still members of the Bosnian Serb police force when they were arrested in 2005.
In the days after the fall of the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb troops captured, detained and executed about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men from the enclave.
Muslim women and children were forcibly transferred to Muslim-held parts of Bosnia.
The Srebrenica massacre has been classified as an act of genocide by the international court of justice and the UN war crimes tribunal, both based at The Hague.
It is considered the worst single atrocity on European soil since World War II.
The Bosnian war crimes chamber was established in 2005 in a bid to ease the burden on the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia based in The Hague.