Ratko Mladic trial: act of genocide in Srebrenica caught on film

Video footage of the execution of Dino Salihovic, a 16-year-old Bosnian Muslim gunned down with other teenagers at Srebrenica, was shown at the opening of Ratko Mladic's trial.

Ratko Mladic is seen at the start of his trial at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands Photo: AP

By Bruno Waterfield, The Hague

16 May 2012

The film of the murder of Dino and five other men near Srebrenica in July 1995 will be typical of the shocking evidence and testimony presented at the first genocide trial in Europe since the Holocaust.

"You watch him walk forward, his hands bound behind his back. We watch a burst of fire tear through his back," said Dermot Groome, the prosecutor, said.

As Dino falls to the ground, his red-beret clad Serb killers, members of an paramilitary unit known as the Skorpions, shout "die a virgin".

The killings are typical of the slaughter by Bosnian Serbs, commanded by Mladic, of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in fields and woods around Srebrenica.

The crime was one of many committed in the wake of the city's capture by Bosnian Serb forces commanded by Mladic. The killers were so confident they would never face justice that they

DNA evidence led to the positive identification of all six victims: Dino, 16, Azmir Alispahic, 16, Safet Fejzic, 17, Smajil Ibrahimovic, 34, Sidik Salkic, 36, and Juso Delic, 25.

They had fled Srebrenica, declared a "safe area" by the United Nations, as Bosnian Serbs advanced. Mr Ibrahimovic and Mr Salkic were forced to drag the bodies of their younger companions from the murder site into an abandoned cottage and were then killed themselves. The bodies were doused with petrol and set alight.

Today, Mladic will hear his own words used against him as UN prosecutors seek to prove his guilt of genocide by drawing on his wartime diaries, radio intercepts and bragging appearances he made on television during the Bosnian war.

Evidence will show that Mladic acted on orders, the notorious "directive seven", from Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb president, to "create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further

survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica".

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2012