Today, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) pronounced the first instance verdict in the case of Marko Samardžija before Section I for War Crimes, finding the Accused guilty of Crimes against humanity and sentencing him to 26 years imprisonment.

The verdict pronounced by the Trial Panel contains, inter alia, the following findings: as the commander of the 3rd Company of the Sanica Battalion within the 17th Light Infantry Brigade, on 10 June 1992 the Accused ordered his soldiers to remove all Bosniak male civilians in the Brkić and Balagić Brdo villages from their houses and to take them to the Jezerine plain.  The Accused waited for them at this location with his armed soldiers.  They then conveyed all men between the ages of 18 and 60 with their hands behind their backs to the courtyard of the Biljanina Primary School.  Some of these Bosniak men were detained in classrooms from which they were brought out in groups of 5 to 10 and executed.  The Accused and his men moved the remaining men, while beating them, onto buses on which they were transported to Lanište where most of them were killed.  He  also took part in the gathering and transfer of the bodies of the victims, which bodies were exhumed from the Lanište, Crvena zemlja and Biljani mass graves during 1996 (at least 144 persons killed with the use of firearms).

The time the Accused has spent in custody from 21 March 2005 will count towards his sentence.

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