Bosnian Serb soldier sentenced to 15 years for killing five Muslim civilians during 1992 Zecovi massacre

SARAJEVO (MNTV) — Bosnia’s state court sentenced former Bosnian Serb soldier Dusko Zoric to 15 years in prison for the killing of five Bosniak Muslim civilians during an attack on the village of Zecovi near Prijedor in July 1992 — the latest conviction stemming from a massacre that claimed at least 69 lives and remains one of the most harrowing episodes of the Bosnian War.

The court found that Zoric, now 55, had pointed his automatic rifle at a group of men who had just been pulled from their homes, cursed one of them, and then opened fire — killing all five on the roadside. He was 21 at the time. Judge Saban Maksumic said witness testimony established Zoric’s involvement beyond all reasonable doubt.

Zoric, a wartime member of the Rasavacka Company of the Bosnian Serb Army’s 43rd Prijedor Motorised Brigade, was acquitted of two additional counts relating to a separate killing two days later in the nearby hamlet of Gradina, where approximately 30 women and children hiding in two houses were massacred. 

A survivor who was 15 at the time identified Zoric, but the court ruled there was insufficient evidence to confirm his participation in that atrocity.

In determining the sentence, the court weighed as aggravating factors the reckless manner in which the crime was carried out and Zoric’s prior criminal convictions. His relatively young age at the time of the killings and his family circumstances were considered mitigating.

A long road to justice

Zoric’s trial originally began in 2015 alongside five co-defendants. Their proceedings were separated from his in December 2022 after he was arrested in Germany on weapons charges. He was extradited to Bosnia last year to face the war crimes indictment.

The five co-defendants were convicted in 2023, with sentences ranging from five to 20 years. Ilija Zoric — no relation to Dusko — received the heaviest sentence of 20 years for his role in the killings. Their convictions were upheld on appeal in September 2024 in a final and non-appealable verdict.

The attack on Zecovi took place in July 1992 during the opening months of the Bosnian War, when Bosnian Serb forces carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing across the Prijedor municipality that targeted Bosniak Muslims and Bosnian Croats with systematic brutality.

At least 69 people — half of them women and children — were killed in and around the village over the course of several days. According to court testimony from the earlier trial, soldiers from the 43rd Brigade and accompanying police went to the home of a man named Hasan Bacic on July 25, 1992, knowing that only women and children were inside. 

When a woman called Sehrija Bacic answered from within that there were only women and children present, the soldiers ordered everyone out — and then opened fire, killing all those inside except a 15-year-old who survived by hiding on a horse cart.

Prijedor itself was the site of some of the war’s worst atrocities. The Omarska, Keraterm, and Trnopolje detention camps — known collectively as the “Triangle of Horror” — were established in the municipality in 1992, and approximately 6,000 people, predominantly Bosniak Muslims and Croats, were killed there between April and August of that year.

War criminals as “heroes”

A BIRN investigation published in March revealed that the Prijedor municipal government had approved financial grants from its budget to two of the convicted war criminals from the Zecovi case — Ilija Zoric, sentenced to 20 years, and Ljubisa Cetic, sentenced to five years. Ilija Zoric received 2,000 Bosnian marks (roughly €1,000) in December 2024, five months after his conviction became final.

Fikret Bacic, who is still searching for the remains of his wife, children, and more than 20 other family members killed at Zecovi, expressed outrage at the payments. “They are not criminals to the Prijedor authorities, but heroes — a protected category,” he said.

A lawyer consulted by BIRN noted that under Bosnia’s criminal code, anyone who awards honours, privileges, or financial assistance to a person convicted of war crimes under a final verdict can face a prison sentence of at least three years — raising the possibility of legal consequences for the mayor who approved the grants.

Bodies still missing

More than three decades after the massacre, families continue to search for the remains of their loved ones. According to surviving family members, one reason the bodies have never been found is the refusal of convicted perpetrators — including those now receiving municipal financial support — to reveal where the victims were buried after they were killed.

The approximately 100,000 people killed during the 1992-95 Bosnian War included a disproportionate number of Bosniak Muslims, who were the primary targets of the ethnic cleansing campaigns carried out by Bosnian Serb forces. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia classified the massacre at Srebrenica — where more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed in July 1995 — as genocide. The violence at Prijedor, while not carrying the same legal designation, was part of the same systematic campaign of extermination.

The verdict adds Dusko Zoric to the list of those held accountable for what happened at Zecovi. For families like the Bacics, the sentence is a measure of justice — but an incomplete one, delivered 34 years after the crime, in a municipality where the men who killed their relatives are still treated as local heroes, and where the dead still cannot be found.