It was afternoon on August 18, 1991 when a truck with yellow tarpaulin side-curtains stopped in front of a hotel in Vocin, a village with just over 1,500 residents in Croatia’s central Slavonia region, 130 kilometres from the capital Zagreb.
Nothing seemed unusual about their arrival, but the people in the truck were no ordinary hotel guests.
Several armed men in camouflage uniforms got out of the vehicle and entered the building, pointing their rifles at people sitting at the hotel bar and ordering everyone to lie down.
One of the armed men asked to see the hotel manager, and a local man named Branko Ilic stepped forward and confirmed that he was in charge. They immediately jumped him and put him in handcuffs.
The men took Ilic out of the hotel and pushed him into the truck. A female bartender who was watching asked one of the men what would happen to her. He ordered her to flee, and she immediately headed for the nearest bus station.
While she was waiting at the bus station, the truck drove towards Lager Sekulinci, a place known as the base for Serbian paramilitary forces in the area around Vocin. Residents of Vocin saw the truck regularly after it took Ilic towards Sekulinci, but they never saw the hotel manager alive again.
Ilic’s body was found seven years later at Lager Sekulinci, DNA analysis confirmed. He is presumed to have been killed.
This reconstruction of what happened on August 18, 1991 was assembled from the testimonies of six witnesses given at police stations or at the prosecutor’s office, among them Ilic’s parents.
The truck’s driver was Slobodan Bosanac, although he has been only been publicly identified by prosecutors by his initials. “We were all afraid of him. He was driving a yellow truck through the village and took people away. Those who he took to Sekulinci never came back,” said one witness, identified only by the initials C.S., who was in the hotel when Ilic was taken.
The same truck was used to take other captured Croatian civilians to Lager Sekulinci, according to an indictment that accuses 29 Serbs, former commanders and members of Serbian paramilitary formations, of committing war crimes against civilians and prisoners of war, and destroying homes and cultural and historical monuments between mid-July and mid-December 1991.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
