1704953680
Samac was arrested and remanded in custody in January 2016 during a joint operation by Interpol and the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). He was then placed under house arrest, writes Nexta.
In April of the same year, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office refused to extradite Samac to Bosnia and Herzegovina and released him from prison. Now Putin has given him Russian citizenship by personal decree.
The Balkan Insight newspaper reported in April 2016 that Russian prosecutors released Samac due to his critical health condition. “Samac came to Kurgan for treatment because he was seriously injured during the war in the former Yugoslavia,” said then-Russian High Commissioner for Human Rights Ella Pamfilova (now head of the Election Commission) in a letter to the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office in February 2016.
❗️ Putin granted citizenship to a Bosnian war criminal who was involved in killing civilians
Bosnian Serb Ratko Samac, a former officer in the Yugoslav army and participant in the Bosnian Civil War, has received Russian citizenship.
Bosnia and Herzegovina requested his extradition on… pic.twitter.com/DoKaMxNHlC
– NEXTA (@nexta_tv) January 9, 2024
In the same letter, Pamfilova also questioned the impartiality of the Bosnian courts and said that Samac would not receive a fair trial in the country. “If there are reasonable doubts about the impartiality of the prosecution against Ratko Samac, his extradition should be refused,” wrote Pamfilová at the time, who allegedly received a letter from Samac’s wife claiming that Samac himself viewed the prosecution as “a consequence of religious and political persecution of his person.
The Russian government agency TASS also reported that Samac had acquired Russian citizenship. She writes about Samac not as a war criminal but as a “war veteran,” adding that the former officer came to the Russian city of Kurgan for treatment in 1999 and was subsequently arrested at the request of that southern Urals city of Sarajevo in 2016. It is not clear whether Samac was only in the Kurgan for the entire seventeen years.
Massacre in Ključa
According to Hague Tribunal documents dealing with the Ključ massacre, on July 10, 1992, units of the 17th Light Infantry Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army and police from the nearby village of Sanica arrived in Biljani, a district of Ključ. and took part in a “blockade, search and evacuation of the area”.
According to the Hague Tribunal’s verdicts, about 200 people were killed that day in Biljani after Bosnian Serb army soldiers and police abducted them from their homes. The victims included elderly people, women and a four-month-old child, writes Balkan Insight in another report.
The Russian cannibal served his time at the front. He goes back home
#Putin #granted #Russian #citizenship #war #criminal