Mladen Naletilić Tuta sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for incitement to murder

The County Court in Zagreb found former HVO Punishment Battalion commander Mladen Naletilić Tuta guilty of incitement to murder Damir Brekalo in 1995 in Široki Brijeg, HRT reports, as carried by the Patria news agency.

He was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison, which will include the 2 years he spent in custody in the late 1990s.
Under the same indictment, Naletilić was acquitted of the kidnapping of Robert Nosić in Ljubuški in 1993.

Tuta was arrested for crimes in Ljubuški back in 1997, almost three years before his surrender to the Hague Tribunal, where he was subsequently convicted and then released from prison in mid-February 2013 after serving two-thirds of a 20-year sentence.

The prosecution charged him with breaking into the police station in Ljubuški in November 1993 with about 50 members of the Punishment Battalion, disarming the guards and the station chief in order to take Nosić, whom he held responsible for the death of a Punishment Battalion member, to Mostar. 

Nosić, a member of the Herzegovinian HOS, was later listed as a missing person, although according to media reports he was killed shortly after the kidnapping. 

The indictment also charged Naletilić with abusing Brekalo at the Tobacco Station in Široki Brijeg in 1995. Brekalo, who before joining the HVO was known as Amir, was also later imprisoned in Zenica for war crimes.

At the Hague Tribunal, Naletilić was punished for crimes against humanity, violations of the laws or customs of war, and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions against Bosniaks in the area of Mostar and Jablanica during the Croat-Bosniak conflict in 1993 and 1994.