One of five Serb militiamen on trial in the videotaped execution of six Bosnian Muslim civilians admitted he was the first to open fire on them but said he was following orders, according to testimony read in court today.
The defendants at the landmark trial that opened yesterday were charged after the June broadcast of the 1995 video showing six people being taken from a truck near Srebrenica, their hands bound, and then sprayed with machine gun fire from behind.
The five face up to 40 years in jail if convicted. Serbia has abolished the death penalty. Defendant Pero Petrasevic refused to enter a plea today, demanding that the video be excluded from evidence at the trial in Serbia's Special War Crimes Court.
Instead, his testimony to a pre-trial judge was read in court. "I was the first to fire the shots into the back of the prisoners," Mr Petrasevic's testimony said.
"After that, I don't remember anything else because I was in shock." He said in the testimony that he only remembers that one of the defendants fired pistol shots into the heads of the fallen victims to make sure that they were dead.
The commander of the dreaded "Scorpions" paramilitary unit, Slobodan Medic, ordered the executions and demanded that they be videotaped,Mr Petrasevic said, according to the testimony.
"I did not envisage my war campaign to be like that, but I had to carry out the order," the testimony said. In statements to the court yesterday, Medic said he did not issue the order to shoot the Muslims and added that if he had known that the video would become public, he would have killed the Serb soldier who filmed it "like a rabbit."
As many as 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed when Bosnian Serb troops overran Srebrenica in 1995. It was Europe's worst mass killing since the Second World War.
The chilling videotape, first played in June at the UN war crimes tribunal of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague, showed four Bosnian Muslim men being shot dead on a hillside. The two others were ordered to carry the bodies into a nearby barn where they, too, were killed.
The video, which caused public outrage in Bosnia as well as in Serbia, was considered by some legal experts as strong evidence linking Milosevic to genocide in the Srebrenica killings.
In his testimony, Mr Petrasevic said the six Muslim victims were ordered to lie down and wait until a fresh battery for the camera was installed so the video could be made. Medic wanted the video made so he could show it to his superiors, who ultimately ordered the killing, Mr Petrasevic said.
AP