War Crimes

Britain's first soldier to plead guilty to a war crime under international law was sentenced to a year in prison and dismissed from the army in connection with an Iraqi's death. Cpl. Donald Payne pleaded guilty to inhumanely treating Iraqi civilians in the southern city of Basra in 2003. He had been cleared of manslaughter charges and perverting justice. Baha Musa was among nine Iraqis taken into custody as alleged insurgents. A pathologist said he died from asphyxia caused by a stress

A top Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect surrendered to Serbian authorities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a government official said. Sredoje Lukic was indicted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague in 2000 on charges of crimes against humanity, said Rasim Ljajic, a Serbia and Montenegro official. He was a member of a paramilitary group accused of ordering and committing executions in eastern Bosnia, according to the war crimes indictment.

LONDON — Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic confronted the accusations against him at the opening of his war crimes trial in The Hague on Wednesday with contemptuous gestures to the court and the victims who had come to see him face justice for atrocities during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Slowed by age and the hardships of 15 years on the run from the indictment by the United Nations tribunal, Mladic still mustered a hint of his trademark swagger as...

Bosnian Serb army Gen. Djordje Djukic, who was released by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague last month because of ill health, died here Saturday. The army said Sunday that the general died after "being ill and exhausted by the trial in The Hague." He had been found to have pancreatic cancer.

A landmark war crimes trial opened at Belgrade's Special Court for six Serbs accused of slaughtering 192 Croatian prisoners in the Balkan conflicts. The trial over the killings in Vukovar, Croatia, comes under a new prime minister who opposes the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague as biased against Serbs. Serbia's judiciary hopes that if the trial meets international standards, additional cases can be tried at home rather than at the U.N. tribunal.

In an early step toward creating a war crimes tribunal, Iraqi lawyers and judges have visited international courts in the Netherlands to study the complex procedures, an organizer of the trip said Wednesday. The March visits brought together Iraqi officials and experts from the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, and war crimes tribunals for Rwanda, Sierra Leone, East Timor and the former Yugoslavia.

Bosnian Serb commander Dragan Obrenovic, accused in the deaths of thousands of Muslim civilians at the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, pleaded not guilty to genocide and other war crimes charges. Prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia say Obrenovic, seized by NATO-led troops in Bosnia-Herzegovina on Sunday and flown to The Hague, played a crucial role in the killings. He could face possible life in prison.

The Kuwaiti government will seek to hang most of the 600 Iraqi, Palestinian and other prisoners being held for alleged war crimes, a prosecutor said. The government will also try in absentia hundreds of Iraqi officers who fled Kuwait as allied forces closed in, said Khalid Mudaf, a Justice Ministry official who will head the prosecutions. Those in custody are suspected of "robbery, murder, rape, kidnaping, arson, assault and forgery," he said.

War crimes judges upheld a 10-year prison term for a Bosnian Croat paramilitary commander convicted of rape and torture for failing to stop a sexual assault by a soldier under his command during Bosnia-Herzegovina's 1992-95 war. The appellate chamber at the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia rejected every ground upon which the defense contested the 1998 judgment against Anto Furundzija, 31.