12 jailed for killing Serbian prime minister

[Lord Zentei]

12 jailed for killing Serbian PM

POSTED: 7:01 a.m. EDT, May 23, 2007

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) -- Slobodan Milosevic's paramilitary commander and 11 other men were convicted Wednesday of assassinating Serbia's first democratically elected prime minister, Zoran Djindjic.

The Special Court said Milorad Ulemek -- former head of Milosevic's elite Red Berets paramilitary unit set up during the wars in Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s -- organized the March 12, 2003, sniper attack in front of Serbian government headquarters.

Red Berets' deputy commander Zvezdan Jovanovic was convicted of pulling the trigger. Both Ulemek and Jovanovic were sentenced to 40 years in prison -- the maximum under Serbian law. The other 10 men received sentences between eight and 35 years.

The verdict, read out by chief judge Nata Mesarovic, said the 12 had conspired to kill Djindjic to halt his pro-Western reforms, bring Milosevic's allies back to power and stop further extradition of war crimes suspects to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.

"It was not an ordinary murder, it was a political murder with an aim to destabilize the state," Mesarovic said, as Ulemek and others reacted without visible emotion.

Djindjic, Serbia's first democratically elected premier since World War II, spearheaded Milosevic's removal from power in 2000. He later handed Milosevic over to the U.N. tribunal to answer for his role in the 1990s wars during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Milosevic died of a heart attack in his prison cell last year.

Milosevic used the Red Berets as a crack unit that spread fear and atrocities against non-Serbs during the Balkan wars in the 1990s. They were later accused of murder and violence against his political opponents.

The landmark trial of the 12, Serbia's first for organized crime, started in December 2003. It has been delayed by bureaucratic and legal wrangling, the murder of two prosecution witnesses, the resignation of a chief judge only months before the trial was to end, and apparent attempts by Djindjic's political successors to influence the trial proceedings.

All but one of the suspects denied during the trial that they organized and carried out the assassination. Five of the 12 suspects were at large, having disappeared after the killing, and were tried in absentia.

[Netko]

First piece of good news from Serbia in the last couple of months (compared to the news of the forming of a paramilitary intent on crimes in Kosovo if it becomes independent and the fiasco of the Radical leader being elected Speaker of parliament, declaring that if Serbia could do it militarily he would be for an attempt at redrawing the borders according to the Great Serbia plans, and then resigning after intense pressure from the EU, in the process utterly discrediting the democratic camp and paving the way for a Radical majority compared to today's plurality) , although I can't escape the feeling that the pawns were sacrificed, while the "kings" got away.