Bosnian court jails woman for war crime against Serbs

1 min 4Approximate reading time

A Sarajevo court on Wednesday sentenced a woman to 10 years in jail for killing a 12-year-old Serb boy during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Elfeta Veseli, who served with the Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) forces, was convicted of a war crime for killing Slobodan Stojanovic, an ethnic Serb.

He and his parents fled their home as the Bosniac forces advanced, but he went back to fetch his pet dog and was never seen alive again.

Stojanovic died in the eastern Zvornik region at the beginning of the conflict, said a statement from the court.

Elfeta Veseli was born in Kosovo in 1960, but was living in Bosnia when the war started.

In 1992, she was part of a unit led by Naser Oric, then the commander of the Bosniac forces in Srebrenica, who last November was himself acquitted of war crimes by a Bosnian court.

According to media reports, Veseli was arrested in September 2016 in Switzerland before being extradited to Bosnia the following March.

She is one of about 10 women convicted of war crimes during the Bosnian war, while another 20 are currently being investigated. Several hundred men have been convicted of war crimes.

In December 2017, former Croat soldier Azra Basic was jailed for 14 years for war crimes against Serb civilians in the northern Derventa region.

That was the heaviest sentence to date handed down to a woman convicted of war crimes during the conflict.

The most senior woman convicted of war crimes is the former Bosnian Serb vice president, Biljana Plavsic.

The only woman judged before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, she was jailed in 2003 for 11 years, after pleading guilty.

The Bosnian war is thought to have left more than 100,000 people dead.