A police spokeswoman confirmed that a report had been filed against a person with initials A.G. on suspicion of having committed war crimes.
The police in the Republika Srpska, the Serb entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina, submitted a criminal report against Croatian General Ante Gotovina. The local media reported that the file about him had been sent to the Office of the Prosecutor of Bosnia and Herzegovina for allegedly committing war crimes in 1992, reports Večernji List on April 13, 2017.
Spokeswoman for the police in Trebinje Jovana Cvijetić confirmed that they had submitted to the state prosecutor’s office a report against a person with initials A.G. on suspicion of having committed war crimes against civilians and crimes against humanity. The spokeswoman did not explicitly confirm the identity of the reported person, but local media say that it is Gotovina.
The Trebinje police accuses him that, as the commander of the Croatian Defence Council (HVO), military units of Bosnian Croats during the 1990s war in Bosnia, he violated international humanitarian law and the Geneva conventions during the armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the municipality of Livno in 1992.
The website of the Trebinje Police department also published a brief statement with similar content.
Prosecutor’s Office did not want to comment on this information. “If the report reaches us, we will see what is it about,” said the spokesman for the state prosecutor Boris Grubešić.
Prosecutor’s Office already commented on the “Gotovina case” in August 2016, when it confirmed that Gotovina was not under any investigation, nor was he suspected of war crimes. At the time, the Prosecutor’s Office had only one active case concerning Gotovina, which was opened back in 2006 by the police of the Republika Srpska, when several Croatian officers were reported for alleged war crimes. General Gotovina was one of them, but the Prosecutor’s Office never submitted a request for an investigation to be launched in the case.
General Gotovina was tried for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He was acquitted in 2012, and is widely considered in Croatia to be a war hero.
