A Bosnian Serb was jailed for 20 years by the Hague war crimes tribunal today for murdering five Muslims in 1992.
Mitar Vasiljevic (48), a former waiter, was accused of belonging to a paramilitary group working with Serb military units and police overseeing the Muslim population around the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad in 1992-94.
The case against him had centred on two June 1992 atrocities - the shooting dead by paramilitaries of five Bosnian Muslim men by the Drina River, and the burning alive of 65 Muslim women, children and old men locked in a house in eastern Bosnia.
Judges at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found Vasiljevic guilty on two counts - persecution and murder - and acquitted him on eight others.
The judges dismissed the prosecution charge that Vasiljevic was directly involved in a house burning on Pionirska Street in the Visegrad municipality. They accepted Vasiljevic's alibi that he was admitted to hospital at around the time of the atrocity.
Calling the Drina River murders a "cold-blooded execution", judges dismissed Vasiljevic's claim that he tried to persuade the paramilitary leader to spare the Muslims' lives and found instead that the accused had turned a deaf ear to the victims.
"Pleas by the men for their lives were completely ignored by the accused," Presiding Judge David Anthony Hunt told the court in the latest judgment to stem from the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.