\n A Bosnian court Wednesday sentenced a Croat female former soldier to 14 years in jail for crimes including torture, the heaviest sentence handed down against a woman for atrocities committed during Bosnia's 1990s conflict.\n<\/p>\n
\n Azra Basic, 58, was extradited to Bosnia in late 2016 by the United States where she emigrated after the 1992-1995 war.\n<\/p>\n
\n She was arrested in 2011 on a Bosnian warrant and her trial opened in January.\n<\/p>\n
\n Basic was found guilty of war crimes against ethnic Serb civilians detained by Croat forces in April 1992 in the region of the northern town of Derventa.\n<\/p>\n
\n Sentencing her, judge Sead Djikic stressed the \"defendant's particular cruelty\" in committing the crimes.\n<\/p>\n
\n Described by some witnesses as the \"mistress of life and death\" during the war that claimed nearly 100,000 lives, Basic was found guilty notably of killing a detainee.\n<\/p>\n
\n While Blagoje Djuras was on his knees after being beaten, and held by two other detainees, Basic approached him \"with a knife in her hand which she stabbed in his neck,\" the judge said.\n<\/p>\n
\n She also tortured a dozen other detainees, alone or with other military personnel, kicking and punching them or even hitting them with a baseball bat.\n<\/p>\n
\n She inscribed crosses with a knife on their backs and foreheads, the judge said.\n<\/p>\n
\n Basic is among around a dozen woman indicted for or convicted of crimes committed during Bosnia's inter-ethnic war.\n<\/p>\n
\n Bosnian and international courts condemned several hundred men for war crimes during the 1992-1995 conflict.\n<\/p>\n
\n Former Bosnian Serb vice-president Biljana Plavsic, 87, remains the most famous woman war criminal from the former Yugoslavia.\n<\/p>\n
\n Plavsic, the only woman tried before the UN war crimes court in The Hague, was sentenced to 11 years in jail in 2003, after pleading guilty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Bosnian court Wednesday sentenced a Croat female former soldier to 14 years in jail for crimes including torture, the heaviest sentence handed down against a woman for atrocities committed during Bosnia's 1990s conflict. Azra Basic, 58, was extradited to Bosnia in late 2016 by the United States where she emigrated after the 1992-1995 war. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-35938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n