Bosnian Serb jailed for 20 years over Srebrenica

A Bosnian court on Friday sentenced a Bosnian Serb former policeman to 20 years in prison over his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Muslims. Bozidar Kuvelja "participated in the expulsion of the Srebrenica population, detention of men and execution of detainees," judge Jasmina Kosovic said. "He is found guilty for crimes against humanity and the court sentences him to 20 years imprisonment," she said. The judge said that the 41-year-old defendant, who had pleaded not guilty, "on July 14, 1995, took part in the execution of several dozen men detained at a farm in Kravica," a village near Srebrenica. Kuvelja at the time was a member of a Bosnian Serb interior ministry's training centre. At the same time the court acquitted Kuvelja of genocide charges, saying the prosecutor had failed to prove that he consciously intended to exterminate an ethnic group. Kuvelja had fled to Serbia during the 1990s war in Bosnia and was forced to join his unit shortly before the Srebrenica massacre, the judge said. In May two top officials of the Bosnian Serb training centre were given 30- and 35-year jail sentences after being found guilty of genocide against Srebrenica Muslim men and boys. Other members of the same unit have either been already sentenced or indicted for the execution of more than a thousand Muslims at Kravica farm. In July 1995, several months before the end of the war in Bosnia, Bosnian Serb forces killed some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern enclave of Srebrenica, the crime designated as genocide by two international courts.