MILOSEVIC "TRIAL" SYNOPSIS - JANUARY 26, 2004: PROSECUTION CLAIMS 2,541 BODIES FOUND AND 70 IDENTIFIED FROM SREBRENICA
www.slobodan-milosevic.org - January 29, 2004

Monday, January 26, 2004 - Dean Manning an investigator employed by the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICTY testified against Slobodan Milosevic on Monday.

Prior to his employment in the Office of the Prosecutor Mr. Manning was a detective for the Australian Police.

As an investigator for the prosecution, Mr. Manning prepared a report about what he has found over the course of the exhumations of mass graves connected to Srebrenica between 1996 until the present day.

Contrary to media reports the graves have not unearthed 8,000 bodies. According to Mr. Manning 2,541 different bodies are confirmed to have been found, and only 70 bodies have been identified by the ICTY. Manning claimed that the B-H government may have identified more bodies, but he didn't know how many.

According to Mr. Manning's report 1,175 bodies were killed by gunshot wounds. 67 were killed by shrapnel or blast injuries. 11 were killed by a combination of gunshot wounds and shrapnel or blast injuries, and the cause of death for the rest is undetermined, meaning that the cause of death for over half of the bodies is unknown.

All of the corpses are men, except for one woman. The youngest body found is thought to be approximately 12 years old. The vast majority of the cadavers are of military aged men.

President Milosevic asked Manning if there was any indication that anybody from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was involved. Manning said that there was no evidence that anybody from Yugoslavia was involved with any of the killings.

Manning said that there are only two known perpetrators. One is a VRS soldier who was later killed in the war, and the other is Drazen Erdemovic, who is a Croat.

Erdemovic was sentenced to 10 years in prison for taking part in executions, and was let out of prison after serving only 6 years.

Mr. Manning claimed that it was 30,000 men who had set out to breakthrough the Serbian lines together with the B-H Army towards Tuzla in July of 1995, and not the 15,000 that had been claimed by earlier witnesses.

Mr. Manning knew that people were killed in the fighting around Srebrenica, but he didn't know where they were buried. Manning held the opinion that nobody in the graves had been killed in battle, even though he didn't know how half of them had been killed.

Mr. Manning was only briefly examined by Mr. Nice. Rule 89(F) was used and the examination-in-chief was over in just a few minutes. President Milosevic was only given an hour and a half for his cross-examination, and Mr. Tapuskovic was only given 15 minutes. It seems more than a little odd that a witness of this nature would be examined so quickly.

The next witness was Reynaud Theunens. He holds the rank of commandant in the Belgian army, and he works for the Office of the Prosecutor too. He wrote a report for the Prosecution about the command structure of the armed forces operating on the territory of the former SFRY. His cross-examination will be covered in the summary of Tuesday's proceedings.
 

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