here - Humanitarian Law Center/Fond za humanitarno pravo

murder, it was alleged that the same police officer who had killed Hamdija beat Halim and his
son and cut their faces. The policeman arrived with blood on his hands, uniform, the barrel of his
gun and a knife at his waist. Then, the deputy police commander came and he and another two
policemen restrained him. A police officer named Boban took Halim and his son to the town
hospital to get their wounds treated. On return from the hospital, they saw the body of Hamdija
on the street. His head was blown off and his clothes were cut. While Halim did not see the
murder, he later found out from fellow-townsmen that the same policeman who had beaten him
had immediately before that killed Hamdija. He did not recognize the accused.
Analysis of proceedings
Proceedings against Lukić have been ongoing for more than 13 years. The length of the
proceedings, and also the decisions that have been rendered so far, and made available to the
HLC, draw severe criticism.
The indictment filed by the Office of the District Prosecutor in Prokuplje on 14 June 1999 was
flawed in the part relating to the legal qualification of the offence charged: Lukić was charged
with murder, although his actions contain all the essential elements of a war crime against the
civilian population. 91 The crime the accused is charged with was committed on 24 April 1999,
that is, in the course of the armed conflict and thereby it meets the temporal requirement, as one
of the essential elements of the offence of war crime against civilians. Also, the offence was
committed in Podujevo/Podujevë, which was, at the time of the commission of the offence,
affected by the armed conflict. At the time of the crime, Lukić was a member of the MUP of the
RS, one of the parties to the conflict. There is no doubt that killing of civilians, a protected
category, in the circumstances described above does constitute a violation of international law.
The District Court in Prokuplje, which on 25 June 1999 delivered a first-instance judgment in this
case, consistently adhered to the designation of the offence stated in the indictment, although it is
well known that courts are not bound by a specific designation of the offence with which a person
is charged. The trial chamber, presided over by judge Branislav Niketić, the then President of the
District Court in Prokuplje, made some serious errors with respect to fact-finding, as the facts of
the case, as presented in the judgment, are permeated with political views and contradictions. For
example, the judgment describes Podujevo as a specific town, filled with terrorists attacking
police. The accused was described as having a misconception that Hamdija (born in 1936) was a
terrorist. Only later does it state that the accused ’s misconception was not genuine, as the late
Hamdija did not have a gun, and that this was not a case of self-defense because the accused was
not attacked.
The chamber’s decision to suspend Miloš Lukić’s sentence amounts to a gross violation of the
CC. The court suspended the sentence, even though the statutory requirements for such a
91 Article 142 of the CC of the FRY.
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