First witness testifies in Mladic trial

On Monday, Elvedin Pasic gave the UN court a harrowing description of his family’s escape from their western Bosnian village of Hrvacani in June 1992.

Pasic said when he returned to the village with his mother a few months later, he saw an appalling scene of burnt and rotting bodies scattered in the village.

Pasic also recounted how he was captured by Bosnian Serb soldiers in November 1992 and said that after being held in a makeshift prison camp, he survived a massacre that left around 150 people dead in the Bosnian village of Grabovica.

Pasic, 34, was a teenager during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war that left 100,000 people dead and 2.2 million people homeless.

General Mladic is accused of committing genocide and other crimes against Bosnian Muslims and Croats in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that began in 1992. The acts of genocide in Bosnia were the first ones committed in Europe since the Second World War.

Dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia,” the 70-year-old ex-army chief spent 16 years on the run before being arrested by Serbian government forces last May and sent to The Hague. He is charged with 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. However, he denies wrongdoing and says that his army was defending the Serb people in Bosnia Hercegovina.

Mladic is accused of organizing the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995 and is also charged in connection with the four-year siege of Sarajevo, during which more than 10,000 people were killed.

If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

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