Sarajevo: Bosnian prosecutors on Friday indicted two former Bosnian Serb police officials of charges of helping perpetrate genocide in Srebrenica, where some 8,000 Muslim men were killed by Serb forces in 1995.
Miodrag Josipovic, a wartime police chief in Bratunac, near Srebrenica, and Branimir Tesic, a deputy commander of a Bratunac police station, were charged with "deliberately helping and supporting the main perpetrators of genocide", a state prosecutor`s statement said.
At the time in July 1995, Serb forces were undertaking a "large and systematic attack on Muslim civilians in the UN-protected enclave" of Srebrenica where 40,000 civilians were forcibly removed and more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys executed, the statement added.
Josipovic, 55, and Tesic, 59, are accused of ordering and taking part in the forcible removal of civilians and the separation of men from their families. They were also charged over their role in the detention of more than 1,000 Muslim males, aged between 16 and 90, in Bratunac, who were later executed.
Srebrenica was a UN-protected Muslim enclave until July 11, 1995, when it was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces.
The massacre of some 8,000 men which followed was labelled a genocide by two international courts and is considered Europe`s worst atrocity since World War II.
It took place just a few months before the end of Bosnia`s 1992-1995 war, which claimed some 100,000 lives.
So far, the remains of 6,066 massacre victims have been exhumed from mass graves in the Srebrenica region.
Bosnian Serb wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic and his Army chief Ratko Mladic, considered masterminds of the massacre, are now being tried by a UN court for war crimes and genocide.
