A Bosnian court indicted a Bosnian Serb former policeman of genocide on Thursday for his role in the killings of many of the 8,000 people captured after the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst since World War Two.

Bozidar Kuvelja, 39, is charged with taking part in raids on mainly Muslim villages in eastern Srebrenica area, imprisonment of Muslim men and boys and mass executions, the Bosnian war crimes court said in a statement.

Bosnian Serb forces killed about 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in July 1995 after capturing Srebrenica, which had been declared a United Nations-protected zone.

Kuvelja, who at the time served as an officer of the special police brigade of the Jahorina Training Centre within the Bosnian Serb interior ministry, was arrested in January in the southeastern town of Cajnice.

"Together with other members of his company he took part in the separation of male civilians aged 7 to 70 and escorted them to a so-called White House in Potocari near Srebrenica were they were imprisoned and exposed to physical abuse," the court said.

"In the evening hours of July 13, 1995 ... Kuvelja took part in the execution of more than a thousand captured Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men whom members of a Sekovici Squad had not killed by that time," it said.

The court said he also participated in the killings of between 50 and 100 Muslims in front of a warehouse where they had been rounded up, as well as in the execution "of a group of about 100 surviving Bosniak men from the warehouse who had been deceived to come out to get medical assistance."
"Once they came out, members of the Training Centre Jahorina, firing bursts from automatic weapons, executed civilians, while Kuvelja checked each man who was still alive by shots from an automatic rifle," the court said.

The United Nations war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague has sentenced 14 Bosnian Serbs for crimes related to the Srebrenica massacre.

The Bosnian court, set up in Sarajevo in 2005 to relieve the workload of The Hague-based court, has put dozens of Bosnians, mainly Serbs, on trial for the Srebrenica killings. Twelve have been jailed, seven acquitted and 11 are still being tried.

The Srebrenica massacre is part of the indictment against former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who is on trial in The Hague, and against his fugitive army chief Ratko Mladic, believed by prosecutors to be hiding in Serbia.

Source: Reuters