Milosevic accuses witness of fabricating shocking testimony

B92 News ^ | May 31, 2002 | Reuters

[ABrit]

Milosevic accuses witness of fabricating shocking testimony
19:09

THE HAGUE, Friday Slobodan Milosevic at his trial today accused a witness of inventing an account of Serb forces mutilating a corpse during the alleged Racak massacre in January 1999.

Bilal Avdiu told the court that several of the 45 victims in the village were mutilated.

"Why are you inventing this?" asked Milosevic, who claims deaths were a result of a legitimate battle the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army.

The witness insisted he saw a Serb soldier cut the heart from one of the corpses. "I saw it the heart was cut out," Avdiu replied.

According to his testimony, Avdiu had feigned death for five hours after being rounded up with other villagers and taken to be executed. (Reuters)

[Hoplite]

1. The issue here is the testimony regarding mutilations of the bodies and whether the autopsy results support this testimony.
2. There is no other autopsy material other than the 1428 pages that were distributed in March of '99.
3. A 194 pg. supplemental report, consisting of crime scene investigation results, with associated forensic information, was produced after the war. Whether this was given to Milosevic at the time does not bear on his being given the full autopsy results in March of '99, and as a prosecution document has been made available to him in the Hague.

Now just where are you getting the disinformation necessary to hold your position, if not from your own imagination?

[Spar]

autopsy protocols are not and never are a full autopsy report in and by themselves. And as you well know, no man made mutilations of the dead Albanians was found from what was made public, so this Albanian witness is a liar or a fool. Maybe the Albanian witness should have read the full report, eh?

[MarMema]

This time, "relatives" of the "victims" staged fainting scenes and rolled around in the snow in front of reporters and foreign TV film crews

Reminds me of the funeral procession for the Pali guy and he fell off the stretcher they were carrying him on.
Then got up and climbed back on to it.

Liars, all of them. Media-players and liars.

[Hoplite]

The 1428 page document given to Milosevic in March of 1999 contained the complete results from the autopsies performed by the EU-FET team. Had any mutilations been in evidence, they would have been noted, with the converse being true as well.

Milosevic has the material, so it's incumbent upon him to reference it to disprove this witnesses' statement, which he has not done.

Similarly, you have not referenced anything whatsoever to bolster your claim that the autopsy protocols have been added to or were edited in any way.

Not that being unsupported in your views to the extent that the only thing keeping you afloat is sheer ignorance has ever stopped you from waxing prolific.

In summary, there were 45 bodies recovered at Racak. Milosevic has autopsy information on 40 of these bodies, provided by either the Yugoslav and Byelorussian experts, or by the EU-FET team. His non-reference of the materials at his disposal to counter this witnesses' claim can only be laid at his feet, being more interested in using the trial to bolster claims of victimhood than defend himself against the counts on his indictment.