Bosnian Croat pleads guilty to war crimes

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – A former Bosnian Croat soldier
changed his plea on Tuesday to guilty on charges including
murder, rape and torture of Muslims during the 1993
Muslim-Croat war in central Bosnia.

“I’m guilty and I’m honestly sorry,” Miroslav Bralo, also
known as Cicko, told the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague
when he was asked how he pleaded to eight counts of war crimes
and human rights abuses in an amended indictment.

Prosecutors say Bralo, 37, belonged to a Bosnian Croat
special forces unit known as the Jokers which attacked Muslim
villages in Bosnia in 1993. It subsequently imprisoned
civilians and forced them to dig trenches and serve as “human
shields.”

Bralo is accused of repeatedly raping a Muslim woman, who
was kept prisoner for about a month. Prosecutors say he also
made Muslim prisoners perform Catholic rituals and tortured
others by forcing them to drink salt water before killing them.

Bralo, who surrendered to the tribunal last November,
pleaded not guilty to the original indictment issued in 1995
which included nine counts of grave breaches of the Geneva
conventions and 12 of violations of laws and customs of war.

But Bralo agreed an unconditional plea bargain with U.N.
prosecutors on a simplified indictment that added the charge of
persecution, a crime against humanity, for involvement in a
massacre of more than 100 Muslims in Ahmici in April 1993.

Bralo said he understood the implications of pleading
guilty and said he had not been coerced into changing his plea.
The court said it accepted his plea and would hold a judgment
hearing on Oct. 10.