Serb Paramilitaries Found Guilty in War Crimes Trial

Four Serb paramilitaries filmed as they killed Bosnian Muslims in 1995 were today found guilty of murder at Serbia's war crimes court.

The former militiamen - members of the notorious Scorpions paramilitary unit - were convicted in the first court case linked to the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica.

Video footage shows six Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica being shot dead in the Bosnian village of Trnovo in July 1995.

The victims were among the thousands murdered during the final stages of the 1992-1995 ethnic conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The Scorpions commander, Slobodan Medic, and a fellow paramilitary were each sentenced to 20 years in prison. Pero Petrasevic, the only defendant who admitted shooting the victims, was sentenced to 13 years.

Another Scorpions member, accused of being an accomplice, was sentenced to five years in jail, while a fifth was cleared.

The murders - which happened in the UN "safe haven" - were Europe's worst single atrocity since the second world war. Around 100,000 people were killed in the three-year conflict.

Footage of the Trnovo killings shocked many in Serbia, where some had publicly expressed doubts over whether the Srebrenica massacre took place.

The Serbian war crimes court, set up in 2003, deals with lesser crimes referred to Serbia by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which is based in The Hague.

More than a decade after the killings, tensions between Serbia and Bosnia continue. In February this year, the UN's highest court rejected claims that Serbia had been guilty of genocide in Bosnia.

The international court of justice dismissed Bosnia's unprecedented legal contention that Serbia was guilty of genocide "as a state".

However, it ruled that Serbia had violated an obligation to halt the Srebrenica massacre and punish those who had carried it out.

The court also said Serbia had flouted the UN's genocide convention by failing to arrest Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander at the time, and hand him over to the UN war crimes tribunal.