Alispahic had long ago accepted that her son was dead; excavators had found his bones in a mass grave and matched his DNA to hers. She had never wanted to know, however, how he died.
"After they shot him the first time, his body was trembling, and they shot him again -- in the back. It was the worst moment of my life," she said.
Public airing of the video put the focus on the Scorpions, a shadowy Serbian paramilitary unit. Human rights activists allege that the Scorpions worked with two other special police units, the Red Berets and the Serbian Voluntary Guard, whose members have also been implicated in war crimes.
The video begins at a monastery in Sid, a town in western Serbia where the Scorpions were headquartered, with footage of a Serbian Orthodox priest blessing Scorpion members. They are young men, and the priest is heard on the tape making an appeal to God: "Give your [blessing] to your army of faithful believers [so that] they can subdue the enemy people."
The "enemy people" the Serbian forces were setting out to subdue had been their countrymen until a few years before. The Serbs and Bosnian Muslims who had lived together in the Yugoslav federation are Slavic peoples, many sharing the blue eyes and light hair common in the region, and their language is almost identical. The key difference between them is religion.
Following the blessing, the portions of the video broadcast on television show the prisoners and their executioners near a truck. The killers are now wearing camouflage uniforms, and many are wearing maroon berets with Serbian flags embroidered on them.
A few moments later, the prisoners, walking with their hands bound behind their backs, are shot -- as some of their executioners chew gum.
To the amazement of many in the human rights community, who had condemned the Srebrenica massacre and war crimes for years without getting much response in either Serbia or the Serb-majority areas of Bosnia, broadcast of the video appeared to have jolted and even horrified Serbian politicians known for their nationalism and failure to acknowledge Serb responsibility for war crimes.
Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica described the video as showing a "brutal, callous, shameful crime committed against civilians."
Serbian Justice Minister Zoran Stojkovic said the footage "was extremely important for the attitude of citizens toward war crimes. As a human being I'm truly shaken by viewing these images."
