Court Reverses 3 Bosnia Convictions

A U.N. appeals court Tuesday overturned the convictions of three Bosnian Croats who had been sentenced for one of the worst massacres of the Bosnian war, calling their trial “critically flawed.”

The court also significantly reduced the sentences of two other Bosnian Croats who had been convicted of involvement in the 1993 massacres in Ahmici, where more than 100 Muslim civilians were slaughtered.

The judgment was a severe setback for Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, who was in Yugoslavia pressing the governments of Serbia and Montenegro to surrender more war crimes suspects to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which is based in The Hague.

The five appellate judges ordered the immediate release of brothers Zoran and Mirjan Kupreskic and their cousin Vlatko Kupreskic. They had received sentences of 10, eight and six years, respectively, in January 2000.

The court also cut the 15-year sentence of Drago Josipovic to 12 years, and the 25-year sentence of Vladimir Santic to 18 years.

The case was one of the first brought to trial by the tribunal, which was created two years before the defendants’ 1995 indictments.

Relatives of the defendants, watching from the public gallery, hugged one another and cried out in joy when presiding Judge Patricia Wald announced the decision.

Reading the judgment, Wald said there had been “a miscarriage of justice.”

The judges said criticized the prosecutors, calling the indictments “too general and vague,” and said the trial court had been “critically flawed” in its assessment of the evidence. Prosecutors had built a weak case based on “unreliable witnesses,” the judges said.