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Tribunal Postpones Sentencing of Drazen Erdemovic 24-year-old soldier, the only defendant to plead guilty, is sufffering from post-traumatic stress and unable to stand trial.
Drazen Erdemovic, 24, had been due to take part in a two-day pre-sentencing hearing next week, but the tribunal said this would not go ahead as experts had concluded he was suffering from post-traumatic stress and could not stand trial. Erdemovic broke down and wept as he pleaded guilty on May 31 to helping shoot dead hundreds of unarmed Muslim men after the U.N. protected safe area fell to Bosnian Serb forces.
He said officers of his unit in the Bosnian Serb army had told him he would be shot too if he refused to take part. Erdemovic was arrested in Serbia and transferred to the U.N. tribunal's detention centre after speaking to western media about his role in the Srebrenica killings.
A tribunal spokesman said Erdemovic's case would be postponed pending further psychiatric and pyschological examination to be completed by October 31. However he is expected to testify on Friday in hearings in the case of Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic who have been indicted on various counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
As Erdemovic had already pleaded guilty, next week's hearings would have been limited to a consideration of possible mitigating or aggravating circumstances, followed by sentencing. Judges might well take Erdemovic's cooperation with the prosecutor's office as a mitigating factor, the spokesman said.
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THE HAGUE, July 4 (Reuters) - The Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal said on Thursday it had postponed indefinitely the
trial of a young Bosnian Croat who confessed to taking part in a massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995.
Berserkistan, June 4 · Drazen Erdemovic: Portrait of a War Criminal
Berserkistan, May 31 · Erdemovic Pleads Guilty to War Crimes
Berserkistan, May 29 · Tribunal Indicts Drazen Erdemovic
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