Bosnian Serbs go on trial for alleged atrocities

Two Bosnian Serb cousins who allegedly locked scores of Muslims inside burning buildings went on trial Wednesday for alleged murder and war crimes in what a prosecutor described as "one of the most brutal campaigns of ethnic cleansing" in the Bosnian war.

U.N. prosecutors allege that Milan Lukic led a paramilitary unit known as both the "White Eagles" and "Avengers" in the eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war and that his cousin Sredoje Lukic was a member.

In one horrifying massacre in June 1992, the cousins barricaded nearly 70 Muslims — elderly men, women and children ranging in age from 75 years to just 2 days — into a house and set fire to it, prosecutor Dermot Groome told judges at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal.

As flames tore through the crowded rooms and the victims inside screamed in agony, the Lukic cousins stood outside shooting anybody who tried to escape, he said.

One boy and his mother somehow managed to flee the building separately.

After he fled, the boy cowered in a creek bed as the horror unfolded in front of his eyes.

"He cried as he watched the house burn. Listening to the screams of his many burning relatives, believing his mother was among them. It would not be until three years later ... that the mother and that son would learn that each had survived this holocaust."

The Lukic cousins, showing no signs of emotion, sat in court listening to a translation of the prosecution's opening statement through headphones. They have pleaded not guilty to charges including murder, extermination and persecution, which carry a maximum life sentence.

Groome said the cousins repeated the atrocity of herding Muslims into a house and torching them less than two weeks later.

Again, one of the Muslims managed to flee, but only after making a heart-rending decision.

The woman, who will testify at the trial under the pseudonym VG114, was huddling with her sister in the house as it burned, Groome said.

"Efforts to keep the flames off her 9-year-old sister proved futile, she considered that her last act would be to climb out of the house and warn other Muslims to flee for their lives," he told the three-judge panel.

"So in an act that still haunts her to this day — and will for the rest of her life — she loosened her sister's grip on her clothes, abandoned her to the flames and started to bang on the garage door blocking the window," Groome added. "She did escape the fire that night but not before her flesh caught fire, her long brown hair singed from her head, now bald and burned."

In another alleged attack, Milan Lukic and other paramilitaries lined up seven Muslim men beside the River Drina, which cuts through Visegrad, and shot them in the back with semiautomatic gunfire, Groome said. Two of the men survived by falling into the river and playing dead. They also will testify at the trial.

Milan Lukic was arrested in August 2005 in Argentina and sent for trial in The Hague.

His attorney Jason Alarid insisted his client was innocent and is a victim of mistaken identity because his name is one of the most common in Bosnia and Serbia.

Alarid said he would call Muslims as witnesses who will testify "that they cannot only not believe that Milan Lukic did this, but they know that he did not do this, and I think that's powerful in a land of such ethnic divisions."

An alleged accomplice, Mitar Vasiljevic, was convicted by the tribunal in 2004 and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The tribunal had planned to send both Lukic cousins to Bosnia for trial as a way of speeding up proceedings at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which is under pressure to finish all trials and appeals and close its doors by 2010.

However, Milan Lukic successfully appealed against having his case transferred and judges then decided to try both cousins together in The Hague so witnesses would not have to testify twice.