VIDEO: Member of Scorpions sentenced to 15 years in prison for shooting Srebrenica victims

Due to participation in a war crime in which six Bosniak civilians from the Srebrenica area were killed, three of them minors, the Osijek County Court today found Milorad Momić (51), a former member of the Serbian paramilitary unit Scorpions, guilty and sentenced him to 15 years in prison, the Patria news agency reports.

The indictment charged Momić with committing the war crime in July 1995 in the village of Godinjske Bare, near Trnovo, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a member of the paramilitary unit Scorpions, which was attached to the Army of Republika Srpska.

He was charged with, together with four known and several unknown members of the Serbian paramilitary unit Scorpions, after taking over six captured Bosniak civilians from the Srebrenica area, on the orders of their commander Slobodan Medić, taking the prisoners near a combat position and shooting them there.

In this way, they intended to falsely present that the Bosniaks died in combat operations, rather than being killed, and thus conceal the mass and organized liquidations of Bosniak men arrested in the Srebrenica area.

Momić was charged with, together with other perpetrators, firing a firearm into the backs of four bound civilians, and then ordering the remaining two to transfer the bodies to a nearby burned-out weekend cottage, where they killed the remaining two victims by gunfire, after which they poured gasoline over the victims' bodies and set them on fire.

The trial chamber concluded that the evidentiary proceedings unequivocally established that Milorad Momić committed the criminal act of war crime, with the video recording of the event, made by the perpetrators themselves, significantly aiding this, which, as Judge Zvonko Vrban stated, is indeed a rare case, but it facilitated the trial chamber in identifying the perpetrators and victims.

The trial chamber deemed Momić's defense that he did not shoot at the victims but was merely a passive observer as false and unreliable, because the video recording shows that all perpetrators actively participated in the physical and psychological abuse of the civilians, and that Momić showed no pity for the victims, nor did he oppose the will and intent to kill the arrested individuals.

As aggravating circumstances, the Court took into account that Milorad Momić participated in a war crime against civilians who were not involved in combat operations and were killed without any valid reason, and that Momić expressed no remorse for the committed crime during the proceedings.

The trial chamber extended Momić's detention, and the time he has spent in detention so far, since August 25, 2014, has been credited towards the imposed sentence, Index reports.