On Wednesday, the US Federal Court sentenced a resident of Loganville for obtaining US citizenship through fraud, because he concealed the fact that he was a guard in the concentration camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina nearly 25 years ago, the US media report.
Mladen Mitrović, who has been living in the US federal state of Georgia, was declared guilty for giving wrong answers in the application for naturalization in 2002. Among other things, Mitrović said that he has never persecuted anyone on the basis of race, religion or nationality.
However, the Federal prosecutors stated that he not only took the detainees in the Trnopolje camp for torturing, but he also participated in the torturing. During the trial which lasted for a week, at least two persons who were detained in the camp on the northwest of BiH in the summer of 1992 identified Mitrović as the guard from Trnopolje.
Pronouncement of the verdict of Mitrović will be held on August 25. He is looking for up to ten years in prison and deportation, after he spends a certain period of time behind bars, the US media wrote. The US county judge Amy Totenberg allowed Mitrović to be free on bail until the pronouncement of the verdict.
The US federal prosecutors accused Mitrović of war crimes within the ethnic cleansing which the “Serb Orthodox forces in the former Yugoslavia implemented against Croats – Roman Catholics and Bosniaks – Muslims”, the media stated.
Nedžad Jakupović, who witnessed in favor of the USA, said that a man called Mladen forcibly took him to a room for torturing in the camp. He said that Serb soldiers jumped on his head, put out cigarettes on the open wounds on his body, and beat him until he lost consciousness.
Mitrić’s attorneys claimed that the authorities have the wrong man.
“Not only Mr. Mitrović is not guilty, but he is completely innocent. He was not a guard in that camp and he never persecuted anyone,” stated the public defender Jeff Ertel.
Ertel disputed the claims of the US authorities by stating that the case is nonsensical because Mitrović is a Croat, Roman Catholic who baptized his two sons, Catholics. For these reasons, among other things, the Serbs would not take Mitrović as one of the guards,” Ertel added.
However, the assistant US prosecutor Will Traynor told the jurors that Mitrović is a very common last name among Serbs and that Mitrović’s wife was a Serb.
“What makes more sense is the fact that the country was falling apart and he joined the armed guys,” Traynor stated.
(Source: aljazeera.balkans.net/photo: factor.ba)
