(16 May 2012) The prosecutor at the trial of General Ratko Mladic showed judges the video in which General Mladic is heard boasting: "Whenever I come by Sarajevo, I kill someone in passing. That's why the traffic for Sarajevo is disrupted. Snipers."
The prosecutor said the video was recorded on August 15, 1994 by Milan Lesic, one of Mladic's supporters from Canada who spent a part of a day driving with Mladic around Eastern Bosnia.
In the video, Mladic is heard explaining to Lesic that the road they were driving on had been cleared of barricades by his forces.
He said they had then brought in tanks.
After that Mladic turned the conversation to Sarajevo and how the sniper fire disrupted the traffic there.
"Mladic talks about personally snipping the people of Sarajevo as if it were a sport, a form of recreation," Prosecutor Groome said.
70-year-old Mladic who went on trial on Wednesday stands accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes by The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
In the third and final session of the day, the prosecution highlighted the role of snipers in Sarajevo, showing pictures taken from sniper nests overlooking the besieged city.
Prosecutor Groome described how a seven year old boy called Nermin was shot by a sniper while trying to cross the road intersection with his mother.
"The sniper's bullet struck his head causing catastrophic and mortal injury," Groome said, "The little boy dropped dead onto the pavement below his mother's feet."
Mladic listened but showed no emotion.
Groome signalled that prosecutors would use Mladic's own words against him in the trial, drawing on a stash of wartime diaries Mladic kept, radio intercepts and appearances he made on television during the war.
Prosecutors say they will use evidence from more than 400 witnesses, though very few of them will testify in court.
Much of their evidence already has been heard in other cases and will be admitted in the form of written statements.
Mladic is accused of commanding troops who opened the war with a campaign of murder and persecution to drive Muslims and Croats out of territory he and his troops considered part of Serbia.
He is also accused of raining down shells and snipers' bullets on the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, and butchering 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Srebrenica enclave in July 2005, Europe's worst massacre since World War II.
The prosecution said all the attacks were part of an "overarching" plan to ethnically cleanse large parts of Bosnia of non-Serbs
Twenty years after the war that left 100,000 dead, Bosnia remains divided into two ministates, one for Serbs, the other shared by Bosnian Muslims and Croats, linked by a central government.
Mladic fled into hiding after the war and spent 15 years as a fugitive before international pressure on Serbia led to his arrest last year.
Now, he is held in a one-man cell in a special international wing of a Dutch jail and receiving food and medical care that would likely be the envy of many in Bosnia.
But the fact that he is jailed and on trial is another victory for international justice and hailed by observers as evidence that war crimes tribunals more often than not get their indicted suspects, even if they have to wait years.
The trial was later adjourned until Thursday.
If he is convicted, Mladic faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
STORYLINE
70-year-old Mladic who went on trial on Wednesday stands accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes by The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Find out more about AP Archive: [ Ссылка ]
Twitter: [ Ссылка ]
Facebook: [ Ссылка ]
Instagram: [ Ссылка ]
You can license this story through AP Archive: [ Ссылка ]
