The Jerusalem District Court on Wednesday morning extended the remand of Aleksander Cvetkovic, an Israeli national suspected of involvement in a 1995 massacre during the civil war in Bosnia.

Cvetkovic, 42, a former member of the 10th Sapper’s Units of the Army of Republika Srpska, is suspected of participating in the murder of more than 1,000 Bosnian Muslim prisoners, one of several mass killings carried out over a 10-day period in July 1995 known as the Srebrenica Massacre.

The Israel Police International Crimes Unit arrested Cvetkovic on Tuesday, placing him in detention at the capital’s Russian Compound.

The Bosnia-Herzegovina government had submitted an official request for his extradition in August last year. The Jerusalem court ruled that he would remain in custody until a final ruling on whether to extradite him is handed down.

Cvetkovic immigrated to Israel with his wife and children in 2006, receiving Israeli citizenship thanks to his Jewish wife, local media reported Wednesday. The family lives in a small town in northern Israel, where Cvetkovic was employed in a local factory.

Israel’s State Attorney’s Office has filed a request that Cvetkovic be declared extraditable, a lengthy document which details the Bosnian prosecution’s investigation against him and seven other members of a squad that allegedly executed hundreds of Bosnians.

According to the documents, the squad was part of a combined Bosnian-Serbian force tasked on July 16, 1995, with executing prisoners held in a local school at the Branjevo Farm near the city of Zvornik.

Their mission was part of a large-scale massacre carried out throughout the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, which two years earlier was designated a safe area by the United Nations. According to official estimates, between 7,000 and 8,000 of the enclave’s dwellers were killed.

The Bosnian request for extradition details how the prisoners were brought to the location on buses, some of them handcuffed and blindfolded. They were taken off the vehicles in groups of ten and led a short distance away, where they were eventually lined up and shot.

At one point, Cvetkovic had allegedly offered to expedite completion of the mission by resorting to the use of an M-84 automatic machine gun. One of the troops who took part in the killing, currently in the custody of Bosnian authorities, told investigators that the killing went on for six to ten hours, ending with the death of between 1,000 to 1,200 Bosnians.

A few prisoners survived the event after pretending to be dead, claimed the Bosnian prosecution.

Cvetkovic was questioned once before by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Israeli daily Ha’ aretz reported Wednesday.

He claimed to having served as a driver at the time of the massacre and denied active involvement in the killings, the report said.

Cvetkovic has denied the accusations against him. Vadim Shuv, a lawyer defending him on behalf of the Public Defender’s Office, said his client is “stunned” by the charges.

“He said he was a soldier, but he did not participate in the actions attributed to him,” local news service Ynet quoted the lawyer as saying.

January 19, 2011
XINHUA

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