Bosnian Train Massacre Defendant Dies Before Retrial Gets Underway

Belgrade Higher Court confirmed to BIRN that proceedings against former Bosnian Serb Army soldier Jovan Lipovac, who was one of four ex-fighters on trial in the long-running Strpci train massacre case, have been discontinued because of his death on February 25.

Lipovac was on trial alongside alleged former paramilitaries Gojko Lukic, Dusko Vasiljevic and Dragana Djekic for participating in the abduction of 20 non-Serb passengers from a train in Strpci station in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993. All the captive passengers were subsequently killed.

The trial in Belgrade, which began in 2018,  has been marred by delays and victims’ families have claimed that it is being prolonged without reason.

Kljajic said that legally, ending the proceedings against Lipovac was the only possible outcome after his death.
“However, the problem is that it came about due to decades of lack of interest on the part of the competent authorities of the Republic of Serbia in prosecuting those responsible for the kidnapping and murder of passengers from the train in Strpci,” she said.

Kljajic pointed out that even during the first trial for the Strpci crime in Montenegro, over two decades ago, “evidence was produced that unequivocally pointed to the perpetrators, so there were already no obstacles to prosecuting them then”.

Another defendant in the Belgrade trial, wartime Serb paramilitary fighter Ljubisa Vasiljevic, died in July 2021.

Damir Licina, the son of victim Iljaz Licina, told BIRN last month on the 31st anniversary of the massacre that he believes Serbia is dragging out the case so the alleged perpetrators’ lives “will not last long enough to answer for what they have done”.

Serbia has been repeatedly criticised for its slow progress in prosecuting war crime cases. The European Commission’s most recent report on Serbia’s progress towards EU accession said the country’s “pace of processing war crimes has significantly deteriorated in recent years”.

The victims in the Strpci case, mainly Bosniaks, were seized from a train at Strpci station and taken to a school in Prelovo, where they were physically assaulted. They were then taken to a burned-out house in the village of Musici, where they were executed.

Lipovac and the other defendants were initially convicted of participating in beating the captives in Prelovo and taking them to the house in Musici.

But Belgrade Court of Appeals quashed the first-instance verdict. A retrial was set to begin in January this year but the first hearing was postponed.

Ten other wartime Bosnian Serb soldiers have already been convicted of involvement in the Strpci crime in Bosnia and in Montenegro.

The Bosnian state court sentenced the former commander of the Interventions Company of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Visegrad Brigade, Boban Indjic, to 15 years in prison in January this year.

In October 2022 , the Bosnian state court also found seven former soldiers from the Bosnian Serb Army’s Second Podrinje Brigade guilty of involvement in the abductions and murders. The judge in the trial said that Milan Lukic took part in the execution of 18 of the captured civilians.

Mico Jovicic, a paramilitary volunteer from Serbia, was sentenced to five years in prison by the Bosnian state court after making a plea bargain in 2016.

Another paramilitary volunteer, Nebojsa Ranisavljevic, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the Strpci crime by the Montenegrin court.

The alleged mastermind of the Strpci crime, Milan Lukic, is currently in prison in Estonia after the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia sentenced him to life imprisonment for other crimes during the Bosnian war, but not for the Strpci killings.

He was indicted for Strpci by the Bosnian state prosecution in 2019. The elementary school in Prelovo where the victims were robbed and beaten was the same one that Lukic himself attended as a child.