Strpci: three former VRS members sentenced to a total of 25 years in prison

The War Crimes Department of the Higher Court in Belgrade has, at first instance, sentenced three former members of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) to a total of twenty-five years in prison for a war crime against the civilian population, linked to the abduction of passengers from the Belgrade-Bar train at Strpci on 27 February 1993, the Humanitarian Law Center says. The individual sentences are ten, eight and seven years in prison.

The War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office stated in the indictment that the accused took part in an armed group that stopped the train at the Strpci railway station in the Rudo municipality and removed twenty-one passengers of non-Serbian nationality, mostly Bosniaks and one Croat. The abducted persons were taken to the village of Prelovo near Visegrad, where they were killed.

In its reasoning, the panel said that the offences had been established on the basis of witness statements, including protected witnesses and expert witnesses, and material evidence collected during the investigation. The panel paid particular regard to the gravity of the offence and the fact that the lives of the victims had been taken on the basis of their ethnic affiliation.

Under the Code of Criminal Procedure, an appeal against the judgment may be lodged by the prosecutor’s office and by the accused or their defence counsel within fifteen days of service of the written copy of the judgment. Appeals in war-crimes cases are decided by the Court of Appeal in Belgrade. In an accompanying statement, the defence counsel of two of the accused announced that they would appeal on the grounds that the sentence was too severe, while families of the victims, through the Humanitarian Law Center, announced an appeal against the length of the sentence, considering it insufficient.

The Strpci abduction case has been before the Serbian judiciary since 2014. The first final verdict was handed down in 2017, when Mico Jurisic was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty. Other defendants have, over the years, passed through various procedural phases, with some of the cases sent back for retrial by the Court of Appeal in Belgrade.

According to data from the Humanitarian Law Center, the Higher Court in Belgrade handed down eight first-instance verdicts in war-crimes cases in 2025, including one based on a plea agreement. Over the same period, the Court of Appeal issued six rulings on appeals. Of the 107 hearings scheduled across all proceedings, only 66 were held.

The director of the Humanitarian Law Center, Ivan Jovanovic, told the weekly Vreme that the verdict was procedurally significant, but that the number of accused and the length of the sentences still do not match the scale of the crime committed in Strpci. In the same paper, representatives of the victims’ families said that the decades of waiting for a verdict have deepened the sense that justice is being done slowly and incompletely.

The next procedural step is the service of the written copy of the judgment on all parties. The Court of Appeal in Belgrade, if an appeal is filed, is expected to rule within the statutory deadline. According to the Court of Appeal, war-crimes cases take, on average, between six months and a year at the second instance.