(ANSAmed) - BELGRADE, JUNE 28 - Radovan Karadzic, former
political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, currently under trial at
the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY), was acquitted today of genocide charges. The other ten
charges, starting with the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995, are
still standing.
The judges in The Hague have decided that there is
insufficient evidence to demonstrate that the murders committed
in 1992 by Bosnian-Serb forces in several Bosnian towns were
carried out with the intent of genocide. On June 11 Karadzic's
defence lawyers asked for complete acquittal of all charges, but
the former political leader still faces other charges, the
Srebrenica massacre, defined as genocide by international
justice, and nine other war crime charges and charges of crimes
against humanity committed during the war in Bosnia from 1992 to
1995, in which a hundred thousand people lost their lives and
more than 2 million were made homeless.
In Srebrenica, in what is considered to be the worst massacre
committed in Europe after WWII, eight thousand Bosnian Muslims,
men and boys, were killed in July 1995. Karadzic has also been
accused of the siege and shelling of Sarajevo, in which almost
12 thousand civilians were killed in three years time, and of
holding more than 200 UN troops and observers hostage in the
spring of 1995. (ANSAmed).
